app academy

What did we do this week?

  • NY is incredibly pretty in good weather.
  • Went to NYC Uncubed, a tech recruiting fair/possibly frat party. FB NY was there in full force with a bulldog wearing a sweater. All the other companies that chose to bring beautiful women instead had no chance. The bulldog probably didn’t want to be there because there was a company across the aisle that was cooking bacon on a griddle. Like, they brought a griddle and bacon and were cooking it for their visitors.
  • Wrote a really fun Hacker News clone as part of my projects. It’s online, so check it out. Additional details on how we made it here.
  • Wrote Active Record (…lite). It still blows my mind that we managed to implement object relational mapping.

Going to try to get Ubuntu up and running tonight. I just really really want that bash shell. Wish me luck.


Daily Reflections

app academy

Photo shamelessly stolen from Julia because she had the foresight necessary to bring a real camera along. That, and actually take pictures of things.

What did we do this week?

  • TDD - learned to write our own RSpec specs and to code while adhering to the TDD cycle.
  • SQL - read a great deal about how SQL and relational databases work, and wrote a whole lot of it while mimicking the back ends of a simple Quora/Reddit clone and a chef/restaurant review site.
  • Proto-Rails - in which we wrapped SQL queries up in Ruby methods and objects to learn how Rails and ActiveRecord fit together and make our lives easier.
  • And the Brooklyn Botanic Garden’s Sakura Matsuri, as pictured above.

The spring weather’s been beautiful in NY, but I’ve been too busy staring at computer screens to explore much. I’d love to go see the High Line when it’s actually warm out. That being said, I’m willing to settle for anywhere that’s not Union Square. I already spend too much time there.


Daily Reflections

app academy

I’ve concluded that trying to post here AND a daily reflection on a daily basis is pretty much insane. Here are some of the interesting things from this week:

  • We made a chess game, almost. Mine stands incomplete as of now, but I was sick. Midweek was pretty rough.
  • APIs! We played with the Twitter API and Google’s Geocoding, Directions, and Places APIs. We made a Twitter client and an ice cream finder program for the command line. Both were incredibly interesting, as that’s kind of what I came here to learn after all. I want to make stuff using Google Map, so I was particularly excited to work on the latter.
  • And, as you can see, we started using GitHub. Git wasn’t anything new since that’s how I deploy this site and all, but it was nice to learn some fancy tricks.
  • ABC came in to record a short feature about us.
  • I also found a place in Brooklyn that offers an interesting brunch item…

Daily Reflections

app academy

A fun new trick I’ve learned the other day - the n.times version of the while loop. We’ve all seen these before. After all, one of the first lines of Ruby that people see is the famous

5.times { print "Odelay!" }

from the _why book.

However, I only learned today that the block parameter for that type of expression is the incrementing intenger:

7.times {|n| print "#{n} "} # => 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7

I mean, it makes sense. What else could it have been? If anything, I should be asking why I didn’t think of this sooner. That being said, I’ve only seen the n.times format used as simple, hard coded repeats. Now that I know this, I’ll likely use this form in place of while loops with incrementing counters. Not only do you not have to worry about misplacing counter increments, I think they just look and read better.

It’s getting sunny out. Maybe it’ll be easier to find photo ops now? Or I can keep looking for 3mb gifs.


Daily Reflection - W1D5-D7

app academy

I wrote like a real post as the daily reflection today.

We’re nearing the end of the first week. What have I noticed thus far?

- My code is visibly better.
- My class and method arrangements are getting much easier to plan out and implement.
- It’s significantly easier to pair program and, mostly importantly…
- Spending all day and night coding is getting kind of fun.

The readings in preparation for w1d4 mainly discussed good class and method design…

Go see it over there so we don’t have duplicate content. I can’t be getting slapped with a duplicate content flag while I have like 60 other “Scott Rogers” pages on the SERPs to beat.

Sorry, no fancy 3.2mb image today…


Daily Reflection - W1D4

app academy, site slowing gif here

Somehow, I ended up tonight with a bit of idle time…

Despite that, I am currently working literally harder than ever in my life, with my days consisting of coding, commuting, eating, and sleeping. And, unlike pchem cram times, the hours put in are paying off. After just 3 days, I am writing noticeably better code, and am having a much easier time visualizing nested, nested, nested, nested, nested iterations. However, because coding is all I do, I have no idea what’s going on in the world at all. If there wasn’t a TV in the free coffee room, I don’t think I’d have heard about Boston until a good two days afterwards. However, I haven’t dreamed of refactoring quite yet. That’ll probably happen soon enough.

How is life in NY, you ask? My life in NY currently consists of commutes and finding food. Luckily, both are incredibly easy. I don’t anticipate having much of a life for a while, so maybe it’ll be better to reflect on this again in the future.


Daily Reflection - W1D3

app academy

The pair programming went swimmingly today, and we plowed through shocking amounts of work. However, there being an equally shocking amount of work remaining for the night, this is about all that I’ll be writing about today.


Daily Reflection - W1D2

app academy, total qa six-sigma d8 quality management excellence process improvement

Picture shamelessly stolen from James. Unfortunately, there’s isn’t much to write here other than that I coded until like 2:30 AM. Fun stuff, I know.


Temporary New Feature - Daily Reflections

As required by the instructor, I will be writing daily reflections on my progress and feedback for each day. Unfortunately, it has to be on Tumblr, so I guess they’ll just have to be grafted onto the posts for now.


Daily Reflection - W1D1