#ironyard

[ohmattschwartzme-blog]

Day One...Sort of.

Hello, Blogging.  Let me say up front that I’m late to the game.  It’s Day One of my new Front-End Coding Blog, but WEEK FOUR of a twelve week accelerator-style coding “Boot Camp” at the Iron Yard in St. Petersburg, FL.  I’m also late to the game when it comes to blogging in general.  I write every day, so it’s unclear to me why I haven’t thought to do it in a way that I can share it with those who are interested in reading.  My best guess is I was turned off by the word “blog”, which sounds like a mud puddle or some obscure kind of German sausage.  

But anyway.  It’s a Tuesday which means three things:  (1) We started a new topic yesterday (”React” in JavaScript), (2) I have no idea what “React” in JavaScript means, and (3) I can do the NYTimes Crossword puzzle. (Confession: I can only do it Monday to Wednesday.  Please don’t judge me).  I have a three day lag when it comes to learning new topics here at the Iron Yard. I’m going to write a separate and more extensive look into why that might be but for the time being, essentially it takes me three days to comprehend something.  And we learn something new every day.  And then I don’t understand it.  BUT I do understand the thing we learned three days ago. At any rate, I’m hoping to close this lag-loop down to zero.  Or at least one day.

Word on the street (well, the classroom) is that React is meant to simplify my JavaScript code.  Thus far I find it to be finicky, sensitive, and a lot more difficult to wrap my head around than I anticipated when I first saw it.  In other words it’s kind of like someone I’d date.  That can be another post as well.  Or perhaps not.  You know what, let’s go with not.  Tonight I’m going to lock myself in a room that has no distractions and research React like a maniac.  A mainreact. Of course, like everything else I’ve been able to grasp, repetition has been the best learning tool.  So maybe I’ll do the homework three different times in three different ways.  Then by the third time, maybe I’ll have a better sense of what’s going on.  

Week One (when I should have started this Blog) I thought I’d never be able to comprehend HTML and CSS.  Today I can confidently say that I’ve genuinely gotten quite good at them.  Honestly.  You know what, I’d like to write a post about that as well.  Okay so to review, upcoming posts include: Why do I have a three day learning-lag and how can I shorten it?  The Joys of HTML and CSS (sincerely).  And one about dating, apparently?  You know what, yes, let’s do that one too.  Why not?  It’s my blog!  This grew on me quickly.  

Stay tuned.......

[ironyardventures]

Announcing the Las Vegas Hospitality Accelerator powered by Iron Yard Ventures

Iron Yard Ventures is excited to announce the launch of our Las Vegas Hospitality Accelerator in downtown Las Vegas. This program is focused on fast-tracking innovation in hospitality and gaming by connecting top early-stage startups with industry-leading corporations in Las Vegas.

The mission of Iron Yard Ventures is to support founders in building strong, sustainable businesses that add real value to their customer’s lives. Our Las Vegas Hospitality Accelerator will focus on Las Vegas seed stage companies, and bringing other top entrepreneurs to Las Vegas to build their companies in the center of the global hospitality industry.

In addition to the new program, we are excited to welcome Ryan Negri to the Iron Yard Ventures team as Managing Director of our Las Vegas programs. Ryan is an experienced founder and investor who brings with him an incredible background, network and drive to help the startups and founders we work with in Las Vegas. You can read from Ryan and why he is the best person to lead this program for us, in his own words here.

This is an exciting new phase for Iron Yard Ventures as this is our first full Iron Yard Ventures Accelerator program in a city with an already established Iron Yard Academy. We are excited to be working with local startups and entrepreneurs as well as some of the largest companies working to transform the Hospitality and Gaming industry in the heart of Las Vegas.

If you are a startup or founder, applications are now open and you can apply here.

For more information about our Las Vegas Hospitality Accelerator and to stay up to date on new announcements, sign up here.

We will be announcing additional partnerships and new program details in the coming weeks. Until then the important information is:

Who: Iron Yard Ventures, corporate partners and early stage technology companies

What: Las Vegas Hospitality Accelerator investing in early stage technology companies

Where: Downtown Las Vegas

When: Program begins in Fall 2016, applications open now!

Why: A unique opportunity to bring together top entrepreneurs, early stage technology companies and innovative corporations to grow real, sustainable businesses in the hospitality and gaming industry.

Who is Iron Yard Ventures?

Iron Yard Ventures is a network of nationally ranked programs for startups and the people who start them. Iron Yard Ventures exists to create exceptional value for people and their ideas through startup accelerators and programming for startup founders. Since 2012, Iron Yard Ventures has invested in more than 50 early stage technology companies which have gone on to raise more than $70 million in follow-on capital. In 2015 and 2016 Iron Yard Ventures was named as one of the top startup accelerator programs in the US.

For more information contact hello @ ironyardventures.com.

[ironyardventures]

Why Iron Yard Ventures is excited to partner with HubX

By now you may have heard about our newest partnership with HubX - a life science accelerator with an important twist. We are excited about this new program as well as the future it holds for great founders and Iron Yard Ventures.

We have now run five accelerator cohorts at Iron yard Ventures, investing in more than 50 startup companies and the incredible founders behind them over the last four years. Over this time we have learned quite a lot about how we can best have a clear and likely benefit on the entrepreneurs we work with and how to help them get to the next stage of their venture. Now four years, five cohorts and countless hours of hard work into this grand experiment, the best part is witnessing the real world impact our companies are having on their customers lives.

One of the lessons we have learned after investing in more than 50 startups is how critically important a great network and partner support is to early stage companies looking to bring their product to market. In healthcare this need for access to customers, users and other partners is particularly important. Ask any healthcare startup founder and they will agree that the sales cycle for healthcare companies can be painfully long. Large organizations with decision matrices can leave startups in limbo for too long. At the same time many corporations are searching for ways to innovate faster and adapt to rapidly changing markets - while working closer with quality startups.

About a year ago, as we were preparing for our fifth accelerator cohort and just as The Iron Yard Academy was launching a code school campus in Little Rock, Arkansas, a group of leaders from Little Rock approached us with their plan to run an accelerator with a focus on solving the access problem for entrepreneurs in healthcare as well as helping leading corporations become more innovative in adopting technology.

This group included a dedicated group of entrepreneurs, investors and perhaps most importantly - leadership from large healthcare providers and payers.

Over the last year we have worked diligently with this group to help them launch the HubX Life Science Accelerator with partnership from both Baptist Health and Blue Cross Blue Shield. Baptist Health and BCBS leadership have committed to investing unparalleled time and resources in the companies participating in the HubX program. This includes up to $50,000 in upfront investment, unparalleled access to decision makers as well as the opportunity for pilots and strategic follow-on investment once the product is in market and the entrepreneurs need to grow.

We are excited to be working with the leadership team at HubX, Baptist Health, Blue Cross Blue Shield, Arkansas Regional Innovation Hub and the many other leaders who are involved in building a powerful network for the entrepreneurs taking part in the program. If you have any questions about the HubX program check them out here or email [email protected]. If you are a founder of a startup that is looking to work with leading providers or payers, applications for startups are open now.

This is the first of several new initiatives for us at Iron Yard Ventures in 2016 as we continue our focus on helping great entrepreneurs build strong, sustainable businesses that add real value to customer’s lives. Stay tuned for more :)

[amicko88-blog]

Post-Client Project Retrospective

Well... it is over and done with. A whole week of, the word I will use is fun. It was fun, but it was also a massive pain in the butt.  I am very glad Bob and I decided to grab one of the more difficult components to work on. Understanding how Parse Relational Queries work will be fundamental to what i have in mind for my final project and all the practice with them I get now will make the final project that much less of a struggle. I feel the biggest trouble I had with the project was in working with some of my classmates. Perhaps if communication had been better, the mistakes that were made could have been avoided. That is certainly something I will endeavor to improve on in the future. It was infuriating to have someone break my (hard-worked on) code all in the name of making it work better, only for me to have to go back in and repair the damage. Or having someone steal an issue I was assigned to because they didn’t notice I was assigned to it. But this was also a great learning experience. I finally have some first hand experience in working in a scrum environment, and I REALLY enjoyed it. Every day I felt like I had achieved something, even if sometimes it was just learning what not to do the next day. All in all, I did have fun, and I can’t wait to be doing this full time.

[amicko88-blog]

Hack-a-Thon!

So, it is done with and over. After all the alumni and instructors hyped it up I expected it to be a nightmare. It was many things, it was a learning experience, an opportunity to grow, it was fun, but it was not a nightmare.. fortunately. I didn’t anticipate how exactly working in a group would be. It slowed us down more than I realized it would. But I am glad of it as it taught me how to better communicate and build things in the code with the forethought of how my actions would benefit the group and the project. I do feel, sometimes, that things may have gone faster and in some ways easier, had there been less of us... but I still thoroughly enjoyed the entire experience.

When all was said and done, and we had an app to present, I was blown away at what we were able to accomplish after only five weeks in this course. if we could this after only five weeks, i cannot wait to see where we will be... where I will be after the twelve weeks this course is scheduled to take. Great places, I know it. Take a look at our app!  http://amicko.github.io/Non-Profit-Dashboard

[newbiecoder-blog]

What happens at The Iron Yard, stays in The Iron Yard... Because no one outside of this bootcamp understands what we're talking about. We barely understand what we're talking about.

Anonymous Iron Yard Student

[venel-me]

Renaming a database column using migration in Rails

Revisiting: There's going to be many times, at least for junior developers. When you misspell or want to rename a database column. I remember having to do flip and cartwheels to figure out how to change it. Its pretty simple once you understand migrations. Here's 3 simple steps that will do the trick.

Now in such situations, to change the column name do the following steps.

1. Execute

$> rails generate migration ChangeColumnName

where, ChangeColumnName is the name of our migration. This can be any name.

2. Now, edit the generated migration file at db/migrate/<whatever timestamp>_change_column_name.rb

class ChangeColumnName < ActiveRecord::Migration   def change     rename_column :table_name, :old_column, :new_column   end end 3.

$> rake db:migrate

This should fix your problem! you can double check by viewing your Schema.rb.

You can always checkout the RailsGuide 

[venel-me]

Nested Resources

So far I have put in over 27 hours into my rails finale application before I ran into a troublesome error. I figured it would have to do with my routes since its an error stating 

  "No route matches ..... missing required keys: [:id]"

so I did what developers do best, look at the new error for about 10 minutes, then changes this up. I dibble and dabbled with it for a good 20 minutes before I went running back to the ROR guide

Talk about being blown away! at a first glance this seemed to be an easy fix. So I assumed(making a fool out of yourself) and went to work, forgetting to note that, I had to manually change all my paths for that model after nesting it. Please don't think I am complaining, well maybe a little bit. At the end, of the day, nested resources actually saved me a lot of time by doing a lot of the relational ties & connections for the models. I am actually eager to dive right back in, learning what else I can unfold.