Oct 2, 2014
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WDI: after
7AM ON THE PLANE IN THE MORNING (read this in Friday melody) I wrote from the plane over to Melbourne.
After the meet and greet, everyone in the class were getting emails for interviews! Super exciting that General Assembly's students were getting attention from employers really fast.
I decided to put some applications in to Google and Atlassian, on hold for now as on the Friday after the meet and greet I signed on to contract at the means, but also Nandita, our coordinator buzzed me to see if I was interested in a teaching assistant position in Melbourne for their first WDI.
It all happened pretty fast, but I got on the phone with Riley, GA Australia's Regional director and James, the coordinator for Melbourne and decided to go for it - another WDI and only three months!
It wasn't a leap for me - I have friends in Melbourne so i wouldn't be completely lonely, and it's not far from home so it's like taking a little trip down to explore a new city for a good amount of time.
I made friends pretty quick with the new WDIs (debug hugs, yay) since I was in GA every day when they started (and installfest and after work etc) and they needed help or revision. I'll miss you guys! Good luck with the rest of the course!
Looks like I'll still be blogging about WDI :D
WDI: The Meet and Greet
As some people may know, General Assembly really helps with getting their immersive students outcomes after their course - WDI/UXI students do generally study the course to get on the career path.
During the course we had Job Seeking Skills sessions with Tarun, the current WDI TA, outcomes and alumni producer and past WDI1syd student to help us with what things to expect.
General Assembly sets up a meet and greet with companies looking for developers with the recent WDI grads - we had to get our project and portfolios looking beautiful and shiny to demo!!
I dearly wanted to do a big revamp of all my projects - two were blocked because I didn't want to change huge things on group projects and my teammates weren't always around. I was at General Assembly very nearly every day after the course ended simply because I feel I work better there rather than home!
I ended up focusing on making a landing page for Didthatfit.me and redoing the layout for stereospace. I drew out an entire design for fireball but knew it would take too long to do, so I opted to leave that for later and just make my portfolio not look like hot garbage.
I decided to buy a laptop stand at the apple store for the meet and greet as the tables were really low - it helped out a bit when people used my laptop. I struck up a conversation with the guy serving me, and turned out he was into web dev too! He was using python and gopy though, a shot him an email and he showed me a game he made based on most googled results on a subject.
The actual meet and greet was great! Four hours of standing and talking to people looking for devs - some of the stuff that people were making were really interesting. I was particularly interested in WattCost, it sounded amazing. And Joel walked out that day pretending not to be proud of us. That's right Joel, I know you're reading this. It's okay, we know.
It surprised me a little that not many people asked to look at my code, but I guess that's what GitHub is for later right? I'm secretly happy that a few people said they could tell I've been a graphic designer when they looked at my sites - I never wanted to lose my design flare. These days it seems pretty important to have appealing design to look professional.
I was super glad in the end for joining Daisy on Pubcrawl - we were both getting that up to demo at least a little on our phones and that stood out. I think we were the only ones working to make hybrid/native feel apps.
At first I regretted not immediately working on my portfolio and fixing my websites instead of jumping into angular and node, but that ended up helping get a contracting position at The Means the Monday after the meet and greet! At the Means they do a lot of work in angular. I gotta thank my lovely Daisy for directing Anthony over to me for phone stuff, he offered me a phone app project to work on straight away!
The people who came to see us did look through our GitHub to see what kind of work we did and how we code.
The most important thing I learned today:
Talking about yourself and your own work gets less scary the more you do it! I'm glad I presented a lot in class.
Things I need to remember:
Try to keep professional contact, even though I may have accepted a position elsewhere Persist, and apply. You'll never know unless you actually try, and even if you fail today it doesn't mean you'll fail tomorrow.
WDI: the final weeks
WDI: the final weeks
This entry comes massively late - I decided to stop writing daily as I thought it was better to use my time coding than recapping at night!
The final weeks of GA were computer science, revision on things some people wanted to go over, looking into pre compilers (Sass and Coffeescript), and more. DT showed us action mailer, lambdas and procs, and showed us benchmarking. We made the beginnings of our WDI class Github page.
After week 9 Joel asked me to teach a short section in the class on metaprogamming in ruby, as I had mentioned an interest in it earlier. Wendy also talked about fractals. Everything is fractals.
My talk was a short explanation to what metaprogamming is, followed by a code along with examples I had tested prior - Joel has them up on his Github. I want to do more tests in metaprogamming to see how crazy it can get.
Around this time we hit TDD(Test Driven Development) in our rails apps. We’d done some warmups with TDD leading up to this, but now we had actual practical use for testing. We went through some apps using Rspec and Cucumber, as well as Capybara.
Week 11 we ran GA's first cryptoparty! Fai ran the presentation and I did backup. I wish we prepped a little more for this, I'm so uncomfortable talking about a subject I don't know well. Interesting tidbit: apparently the CIA sends a team member out to every crypto party just to check if people aren't doing illegal things. Playing spot the CIA agent was fun. We met Allen's girlfriend!!
Week 12 was final project week - I teamed up with Rich again because the idea I had for an app would be more about writing formulas than doing something complex with code. I showed him Patatap, and he wanted to make a soundboard. I thought it would be cool if we could 'record' the notes so we could play it back as a song. We added the ideas together - our project is stereOspace.
We both ended up being extremely sick on the last day(stomach bug?), so finishing touches on stereOspace were at difficulty level 1000. We presented first and then promptly dropped dead while the others presented their work.
I was really sad I couldn't join everyone for the final week project bar hop, it was one I was really looking forward to! I heard I missed out on some crazy happenings. At least I heard about them after!
Super proud of all my classmates that have come so far! Watching growth in others inspires me to keep growing. I'm excited to see where everyone will go.
Reflecting back I really wish I did keep the day by day up, there were things I have since forgotten in each day that were captured by my daily posts.
I've learned so much in the past twelve weeks and I am glad I got to share it with such awesome people. It was so great that we became a little family and grew so familiar with each other - feeling like you belong is massive in being able to grow.
Onwards we all shall go!
The most important thing I learned from this course:
How to debug! Thanks Joél and DT!
Things I need to remember:
Code something meaningful every day. Get quite good at something before getting into the next. The biggest chance for growth is now. I'm going to make awesome things!! This blog helped me revise daily happenings. Keep on trucking with it.
Nodebots
Nodebots
After a long project week came Nodebots - a day that we could work on something completely different!
This entry actually belongs before week 9.
Nodebots was held at NICTA once more, like Nodeschool was.
We used the Arduino board to communicate to hardware and circuitry, and normally the Arduino IDE is the software used to do so, however with Nodebots, we could use a library called Johnny-Five, hook up a server running on our own laptops and talk to the board live.
Since I went to Intro to Arduino a week and a half ago, I didn’t buy a kit, but I sorely wished I did because everyone had motors/servos/more LEDs/entire kits to build SimpleBots.
I ended up learning along with the others kits - I tried to wire up some circuits with Allen’s breadboard(he broke something and it smelled of burning plastic), which is set up completely different to mine, and I helped build Daisy’s SimpleBot, with the help of a few other people (HOW DO I MAKE WHEEL).
Wendy got hers working with the proximity sensor and demo'd on the Monday after!
I heard a lot of people hoping for more of the simplebot kit, I'd definitely buy it if they contributed to make them.
Super looking forward to programming other hardware now that I know how easy it is in node! I'm getting myself some interesting input devices(leap motion & myo armband) to experiment with reading input for control!
The most important thing I learned on NodeBots day:
The pin numbers are super important and breadboards need better alignment in labelling them
Things I need to remember:
Practice more wiring, buy servos and stuff to make killer robot friendly robot.
I've been using nodejs, Johnny-five, Arduino, LEDs wires servos.
WK12D2
Final Project Week!
Currently getting flogged by DOM insertion and JS scopes. 11:17pm.
"Yes you are"
Joel, on whether or not we (the class) are geniuses.
I smell weed.
Ros on smelling cigar smoke.