October 2012
2 posts
day 49
spent the morning with my group. actually, started with responding to an important email, and gavin came over and told me he understood why i was not participating and contributing, but that he was hurt that i hadn’t brought it up. i wrapped up what i was doing, joined my group, and apologized.
spent the rest of the morning working on styling. got things looking pretty nice. awesome...
day 48
spent the morning on impact dialing. lots of business stuff coming up. started working on the first bit of the feature i am building. mainly just refactoring to get ready to build an api. the api will be trivial once the refactoring is done. ran into a lot of problems, but the fun part is that i knew how to solve them. going was very slow, but very steady. awesome.
afternoon worked with my...
August 2012
4 posts
day 47
started the day with shereef talking about hiring and answering questions. notes:
you will have a range of experiences
some will hate you and want to show you you suck
some will think you're awesome just because of going to dbc
you will have a lot of rejection
learning should be number 1 thing you look for
humility and confidence
i am a beginner
i can figure things out
be comfortable saying "i...
day 46
yesterday started getting things set up to hack impact dialing locally on my dev machine. took a lot of time; realized i needed to make some changes for ruby 1.9.3. at first got frustrated and then just went to problem solving mode and got things figured. took a lot of time, but really satisfying to be able to do it.
started the morning with exercises, so i just worked on impact dialing. loving...
days 41-45
group projects this week. came in and pitched our ideas. i pitched building an api for impact dialing, but didn’t get enough bites. wasn’t excited about much of anything but signed up for my favorite, a tool to help groups make decisions. spent the afternoon whiteboarding the product. really glad we did - so many different ways to approach it. trouble was, we didn’t really have a good grasp of how...
days 38-40
paired with austin on a new project, a basecamp clone. felt great about starting something fresh, with the chance to tdd it the whole way. austin was a great pair; really knows his stuff, and we had a good rapport moving back and forth and solving problems together. was really good to be pairing again. really blows my mind how many super solid students there are in this class.
we did some...
day 37
started with a talk on testing. mostly review. took a group picture.
started out with exercises on testing, ran into a curriculum bug, and switched to trying to build the pollster app again. blazed crazy fast using scaffolding ;)
switched back to testing exercises, went through them with some annoying problems that were mostly my fault (in the wrong directory for a while), read some stuff.
...
day 36
spent the day soloing on an app for polling. it seemed really simple and took way longer than i wanted it to. some really annoying stuff about authorizing without user accounts, just using a random string in the url. spent way too much time figuring out the best way to create the random string.
got 3 vaccines in the morning and in the afternoon i totally crashed and got nothing done. it sucked.
July 2012
23 posts
a variation on my first post
teach one thing at a time.
teach by example first, explanation second.
teach through doing, not showing.
teach with practice.
break these rules as needed.
teach one thing at a time.
when it comes to difficult problems, most people only have the mental capacity to learn one thing at a time well. so don’t try to teach more than one difficult thing at a time. only move to the next...
day 35
last day of hacker news clone. worked on exercises in the morning (per shereef’s orders) and learned a bit. spent the afternoon not as productive as i would have liked, but finished up some good stuff on the the hn clone. phil and i paired most of the time, which i liked. we spent some quality time with twitter bootstrap getting the styling better, and refactored some of the polymorphism...
days 32-34
i suck at blogging this week.
continued to work on hacker news clone with phil. really battled with rails and understanding all of the different moving pieces. there are a lot of them. on wednesday, shereef made us spend the morning doing exercises from the curriculum instead of working on the project. it was really frustrating to tear myself away from what i wanted to work on. a lot of the...
day 31
started in on our first big project - a hacker news clone. paired with phil, who i love working with. started out with a bunch of reading, most of it review, and some exercises. went through them side-by-side, working individually but discussing as we went, which i enjoyed more than i expected. after a bit we got bored, so we jumped into building.
the day flew by. it was a lot of fun....
day 30
weirdly couldn’t let go of my url shortener last night and kept working at it before i went to bed. guess i got bitten.
kept on going with the shortener today. started to re-do it properly, without scaffolding. learned a lot and then got annoyed at having to remember everything. anne gave me permission to look at a scaffold while i was building my own, which for some reason i had been...
day 29
rails started today. began with shereef’s tough mudder talk. then we had a longish lecture on mvc, rails directory structure, response cycle, and some other stuff. hit the books to learn more about routing. did some exercises on routing, redirecting, and rendering. paired with someone i haven’t worked with before to get through some of the difficult ones. needed lots of help from...
day 28
corey haines came in for a ‘code retreat’ today. started with some background about how he and other devs would talk at conferences and bitch about how much shitty code other people write, and how much they write. so they had the idea to just take a day and focus on writing amazing code. nifty.
told us to pair up and build conway’s game of life for 45 minutes. we wouldn’t...
day 27
started the morning with shereef trying to decide what to do next - have a breakout on the issues we ran into yesterday, let us continue on those problems, or starting working on refactoring staff versions of apps from last week to use activerecord. quite a bit of back and forth, and decided to work on the apps. shereef joked that if he wasn’t exuding confidence it was all in our heads....
day 26
started the day with our teams from last week, doing a feedback session. each person took turns saying the things they thought they did well and the things they think they could improve on. then the other three team members went around and gave them feedback. pretty great format. when it came to my turn i had a hard time thinking of positive things to say about myself. i had trouble pairing for...
day 25
RAFTING
day 24
last day of our week-long projects (tomorrow is rafting!). jeremy was gone so i soloed while asad and orasa paired. we went over everything that was left and divided it up. turned out to not be that much… but funny enough, we didn’t finish. things take a long time.
writing my own code didn’t take too long to get everything working. but then i had to go in to make changes to our...
day 23
meta skills wednesday. started off with group checkin. always nice. we have two minutes to give a checkin; everybody else seems to find it plenty of time, and i never feel like i have enough. what does that say about me. hm.
shereef’s brother came in to co-facilitate a workshop on the super ego. it was optional and about 6 students opted out. terms like super ego make me skeptical, but i...
day 22
continued on our project. switched pairs. worked on email api. finally learned how to properly test it. refactored a lot. our email model and tests are clean, clean, clean. feels so good to have good-looking code. continued on with a few bits and pieces. not much else to report.
no js tonight. feels really nice to have the night off. first time i’ve left dev bootcamp and not had something...
day 21
started on projects today. were randomly split into groups of four and given a choice of six or so projects to work on. we chose “craigslist crawler”, an app to monitor a craigslist search and automatically email new listings when they become available. whiteboarded the problem, broke it down into pieces, and split into two pairs. my pair and i worked on the user model. thought it...
day 20
morning retrospective. pretty good results all in all. lots of frustration with js. some staff still getting a small amount of negative feedback. otherwise very good.
shereef invited me and brick to leave the staff meeting so after checkins i took him up on it. don’t feel like one more person in an eight-person meeting often adds much, especially when i’m not so good at cutting in...
day 19
spent the day re-writing todo app backed with sqlite. paired with someone a good deal slower than me, so spent a lot of time just getting the app layer written. went back and forth on where to interface with the database layer - in each model, or in a mini-orm. got conflicting advice from teachers. also realized we knew how to design a schema and read out data, but had never learned how to insert...
day 18
fourth of july.
meta-skills wednesday. social rank day. i don’t like “social rank” as a term - read audre lord on “there is no hierarchy of oppression”. rank implies hierarchy in my mind.
started out with steve’s walk around, make eye contact, stop and get awkward with someone. decided i definitely don’t like it. feels very contrived.
all sat down....
day 17
started on sql today. everything is new.
jesse gave a lecture explaining how databases work and the relationships among tables. at first it was a bit weird but then he jumped into excel and basically showed how databases are a way to store information in a DRY way. nice. took a bit longer than i would have liked but not too terrible.
paired up and worked through some exercises in drawing...
learning guy notes
day 17 at lunch the “learning expert” or something from code academy came in. i was interested and skeptical. i hoped for some great research-backed information and expected a lot of pseudoscience. not really sure what i got. here are my notes and interpretation. learning guy - if you’re reading this, please know that this is mostly unfiltered stream of consciousness. i’d...
day 16
we were supposed to start databases, but took the day for everybody to finish what they were working on and get on the same page.
i’m only writing this a day late, but i’ve already forgotten what i did yesterday. i was thinking about writing this earlier in the day (today is day 17), but shereef saw me blogging and made me pay $5, which i resent.
i think i worked some more on the...
day 15
morning retrospective. reallllly good quantitative feedback. good code/talk, loose/tight, etc etc. a couple staff members with a little bit of negative feedback - a bit surprising. or maybe not - i have some ideas of why they might have gotten negative feedback. would have been good to get anonymous qualitative feedback. shereef asked anyone who had negative feedback to give it to the staff person...
June 2012
17 posts
day 14
spent most of the day coding and it flew by. paired with somebody quite a bit newer than me and didn’t touch the keyboard much. took yesterday’s specs from the todo app, threw away the app code, and re-wrote the app making one spec at a time pass.
spent my lunch giving a blood draw and getting a physical for an hiv vaccine trial i’m doing. came back down a notch from the blood draw. didn’t...
day 13
meta-skills wednesdays. shereef talked a bit about the super ego, the voice in your head that criticizes you, tells you not to do what you want to do, gets you down. he also said his super ego was getting him down and he wasn’t in a good place to lead a workshop on super ego. some students gave some nice perspectives on it. i am a bit skeptical of the super ego idea, but it makes some sense....
day 12
spent the morning taking an assessment - several problems that went through most of the concepts we’ve learned. got it done pretty quickly and spent the rest of the morning futzing around on little things, like follower and oauth on which i quickly got bored and frustrated and gave up, and getting distracted. didn’t have anything i was excited to work on. student feedback on the...
day 11
today spent pretty much the whole day on a new oo project - a program to solve sudoku puzzles. very happy with the object-orientedness of the implementation, but after maybe 5 hours of setting everything up, we spent the next 3 trying to figure out why we weren’t actually able to solve the puzzles. i don’t play sudoku, so i didn’t really understand how to solve the problem. it...
day 10
so hard to make time for these posts, but they really don’t take long. gotta gotta do them.
morning retrospective. very good feedback. most graphs were perfect, although still a little too much talking vs coding (which was how i voted). people gushed about yesterday. i said js wasn’t working well for me, since i wasn’t getting the immersion, so i forget so much between weeks....
day 9
pretty awesome day.
started out with a talk on oo design. i was bracing myself for a lecture that was too long and that i wouldn’t use, but it was reasonably short and not too painful. got a better sense of oo. “don’t look in somebody’s stomach to see what’s in there - ask what they ate.”
paired up and worked on a “to do list” app. rocked through...
day 8
wednesday meta-skills morning. got to think of a better name.
steve came in. not 100% on steve. trying to be open-minded to his ideas even if he rubs me the wrong way a little. i think he’s too happy. what does that say about me?
started with everybody getting up. picked one person to try to get close to and one to stay away from. when steve called go we all moved. weird. i’m not...
day 7
shereef started the day with a talk on oo. talked about naming, functional vs oo design, and telling not asking. also introduced factory methods.
interesting discussion but would have loved to have jumped on a concrete example to work on - a project that could be implemented functionally or oo, and that we would implement oo. or maybe that we would implement both ways so that we could see the...
day 6
lots of doing today. nice.
morning was finishing up ruby intro and stuff. people created exercises. worked on follower some more. banged head against oauth.
had lunch with my home group. cool.
afternoon paired with someone on textmate. it was weird pairing on learning textmate. my pair pointed this out and we switched to working on exercises other students had created. some were very poorly...
things to add to ruby intro
each_with_index
map
inject
regex
class variables
global variables
blocks/procs/lambdas challenges
array | and &
default values
enumerables
day 5
started the day with a retrospective. i love how into feedback shereef is. 20 questions, with our anonymous submission displayed in real-time. results were really positive - students felt a bit too much talking and not enough doing, and one other thing that wasn’t quite calibrated right, but everything else was pretty much exactly where you’d want it - most people on panic/learning...
beauty
https://gist.github.com/2939309
day 4
the days kinda fly by. not sure how it happens.
started the day with pushups and whatnot from shereef. i get the idea of being super accountable for ourselves and each other. but i think there’s something missing - making it easy for people to do the right thing. like, if you want people to be on time, put a clock on the wall. if there are things you want people to remember to do today,...
day 3
yoga this morning. had a small impact dialing crisis and was late. brick did pushups. we’re even. yoga was pretty good. really didn’t want to because i really wanted to sleep in, but oh well. i enjoyed it once i was there.
i haven’t done sports at a gym since high school, where, because everybody was a combination of homophobic and ashamed of their bodies, nobody took their...
day 2
not too much to report. started off with a talk about pairing. i don’t think i’m a fan of starting the day off sitting down with a talk. i want to hit the ground running. lots of good stuff in the talk about pairing. but i don’t remember any of it, honestly. lectures are the absolute worst way to learn. the more i challenge the idea of lectures to myself, the more horrible i...
day 1
i have a terrible memory, so my apologies if i accidentally leave out something really important or make up something that didn’t happen.
dragged myself out of bed and got to dbc at 8am. shereef gave a pep talk about the students coming in and the next 10 weeks. prepared a cheer for the students. i don’t like cheers and was not terribly pleased but played along and was surprised by...
four steps for teaching
i’ve been working on a text to teach ruby to new programmers, and so i’ve been thinking a lot about the best way to teach new concepts. today my thoughts clicked together in a way i found useful and wanted to share.
the idea is to teach a concept with four steps: see, do, explain, repeat.
here’s an example from the text:
The each method
Try this:
favorites = ["candy",...
