The Joy of AH-HA

I've been living at coding house for exactly two weeks now and I'm still completely in love with it. Its hard. The "homework" assignments keep me up until 2:00 AM or later and I'm cramming  knowledge in my brain like Joey Chesnut at a hotdog eating competition (var hotdog = knowledge, var mouth = brain, var JoeyChestnut = boss_ass_motha_fucka)

And I have moments of frustration when I can't wrap my head around a new concept right away, but the struggle only adds fuel to the wonderfully explosive joy of the AH-HA! moment.

I've had a lot of ah-ha's. I've also had a lot of slow creeping "...ohhhh I get it now"s. And perhaps most rewarding, I've had a lot of "Thanks Jillian, the way you just explained that made me get it."

There are too many places where people try to get out of working hard without even realizing that all they are doing is transferring their effort from doing something that might satisfy them to avoiding doing things and therefore not getting a pay out. No one is like that at Coding House. I love that our house is a community. We all help each other and respect each other and work hard.

I can wait to find out what I'll be capable of this time next week!

Coding Bootcamp week 1

I arrived at Coding House one week ago today, and I am so excited for the next four months here.

This place is amazing! The instructors talk about code like I used to talk about troll dolls when I was twelve. ie. they are passionate, super knowledgable and deliver information in a really engaging way.

My cohort is a community of the most interesting, friendly, and compassionate people I've ever met. Everyone is more than willing to help each other out and are encouraging and excited about the projects.

Its definitely an intense program though. Class runs from 9:00 Am until 8:00PM every day -- with an hour for lunch. And 4-6 hours of homework to complete before class the next day.

TAs stay and help out until at least 11:00PM, so if you get stuck they can give you a push in the right direction.

There have been a couple lessons where I got lost a bit, but the assignments are very good practice of the skills learned that day, and even though I have not completed all of the assignments in full I have learned so much about javascript, keyboard short hand and efficient coding skills. I think my productivity has increased about ten fold in one week.

That being said, I've got to dive back in to it.

Check out my git hub to see what I've built so far.

Coding Bootcamp here I come

I went to summer camp once, for a week when I was in eighth grade. And I loved it. And when I was in high school some of my friends went to summer camp for a few weeks -- every summer. And they loved it. I've always wished I spent more time at camp. The meals in the mess hall, the scary stories in the bunks, capture the flag in the forrest. I did not get enough of that as a kid.

But I get a second chance-- I leave for computer coding bootcamp in two days!

I suppose it won't be exactly like a kids' summer camp. Instead of a cabin by a lake, I'll be at a house in the suburbs and the scary stories will probably be about infinite loops and losing unsaved projects, but I'm pretty sure I'll be bunking with lots of other girls around my age and sharing meals with them... and maybe while I'm there I can write a capture the flag game to play with my camp friends. In any case, I'm sure there will be just as much bonding and just as many inside jokes and stories. And I should definitely leave with a few extra merit badges on my sash: "Wrestled with Python", "serve a friend some hot java script", "picked her site up by the boostrap".

From what I understand coding bootcamp will be a lot of hard work. But that will be fun too. I miss learning. I didn't appreciate school enough when I was a kid. Looking back, I feel like going directly from high school to college may not have been the best path for me. I have learned so much more about what I want to do with my life since graduating college and if I had it to do over, I would have pursued a different degree. I am so glad that I now have the opportunity to continue my education and strike out on a different career path.

I am excited to cultivate the skills that will enable me to develop, apps, sites and software that will connect people with each other and with the things they need. The internet gets a bad rap for alienating people from each other. And I must admit, I myself am too often guilty of having the back of a cell phone for a face, but I am grateful for sites like Meetup, OK Cupid and Craigslist that have gotten me off my phone and into the real world where I've built a lot of strong relationships with like minded folks.

There is so much potential to unite people and strengthen communities via technology, and can't wait to find my role in that process.

Code to live by. Scavenging the internet for happy fun times

I spent the week between the time that my lease expired and the time that I began house sitting for a month, living with my boyfriend. And as a thank-you for housing me and everything I own, I put together a treasure hunt for him. But not an out-dated map-and-shovel treasure hunt, this was a 21st century digital treasure hunt. QR codes taped to the back of paintings and masks that led to websites with scrambled pictures, fill-in-the blank puzzles and math problems which led to the location of the next clue. It was the first time I've brought together all of the different facets of web development that I've been learning. Using javascript/ Jquery, HTML, CSS for an actual real world application. I had fun making the sites I used -- but more importantly, my boyfriend loved it! It was amazing to be able to translate my hard work and learning into a smile on the face of someone I care about. I think web development is a powerful tool. A way to customize things and make them relevant, meaningful and useful to people. This scavenger hunt was good proof of concept for that...

Arthurs Quest began with a QR code on the Back of a construction-paper super hero emblem...

His first site...

Led him here...

On the back of the painting. A QR code took him to this site...

The Sunglasses had a code taped to the back of the lens...

and so on...

and so forth...

etc...

etc...

until I led him here...

To the rubicks cube with the URL to his final clue...

rubicks are a point of struggle for him...
So he just popped all the pieces off and put them back together so the letters and characters in the URL were lined up right.

then he breezed through the last page...

And straight to the prize at the end of the road,


...a custom comic book. And being as thoughtful and adorable as he is, he sent me pics of his journey. 

Personal code 6.8.15 Networking

Yesterday I went to my first coding Meetup, "Coffee and Code". The event was hosted by a group called Girl Develop It. This is the part where I should say "I didn't know what to expect", but I totally had a preconceived notion of what it would be-- a bunch of noobs like me getting tutored by the one or two ladies in the area that work as web Developers...WRONG! Apparently there are a lot of women around here that do web development -- and sometimes they just like to get together with other like-minded tech savy ladies and shoot the breeze.

It was really encouraging to see so many successful women working as programmers. It seems like there are a lot of good jobs out there and a lot of people to connect with...but at the same time I felt a bit intimidated. I couldn't follow everything they were talking about -- discussion touched on languages, libraries and general technologies that I haven't even heard of. I am proud of the progress I've made and new knowledge I've acquired in the last couple months, but that group reminded me that I am pretty far behind most people working in the industry. Most of these women had a decade + experience on me.

My noobness to both "networking" and coding rendered me a bit shy at the meeting, but I know there is a lot I can gain from these women, so I plan to go back and see what I can't glean from them -- and if nothing else, I'll be able to at least bring an eager ear and some admiration for their achievements to the table.

Personal Code May 31 2015 Silicon Valley kumail nanjiani

I normally don't watch TV, but I've been hearing a lot lately about this show called Silicon Valley. (And by hearing a lot I mean, when I was in my internet-stalking-Kumail-Nanjiani phase, I saw that he was on this show and then last month they mentioned it on NPR --TWICE). NPR is like my third parent (ie I trust what they say implicitly) and this show has Kumail em-effin Nanjiani on it... a man who chopped up "a ninja" and hid it in his damn name, so obviously I forked over half of the amazon.com gift card I won at work, momentarily cast aside my hippy-who-doesn't-own-a-tv lifestyle and downloaded season 1 of Silicon Valley.

So far I've watched one episode. It was a'ight. I think what it needed, was little more Kumail. (I've got  fever. And the cure is Kumail! #DatedChristopherWalkinSNLAllusion). Even without much Kumail, I must say the show got me excited... about programming.

Oh to create something -- to be at the helm of the next big advance. What must it feel like to hit "run" on your code and have it do something that no one has ever done before. Manipulate data in a way that will suddenly make people's lives easier-- and maybe even improve their quality of life.

I have worked in customer service (in one form or another) since high school. Serving one person at a time. Repeating myself. Over. And over. All day. I love people. I genuinely care about my clients I work with. I want to help them, I empathize when the call to complain about a bad experience they've had with their project, but I've never been in a role where I could stop them from having a bad experience to begin with. I'm just in a support role. I help the people in my company that serve customers and I help relay information from those people to customers, but I don't DO anything.

Things will always go wrong. Damage control will always be necessary, but I know if I am devoting my energy towards solving problems rather than assuaging people after a problem has occured, I can make go much further towards making people's experiences better.

I can't wait to have a job where I can make things better-- more accessible, more visible, more efficient.

One day I will think and create big... but for today, I just created some background pic options for my web developer site...

Personal Code May 25th 2015: Toddling towards a new career.

About a month ago I got accepted into Coding House, a computer programming boot camp in the Bay Area. Since then, I have been working my way into the corners of the world (and virtual world) that web developers inhabit. And I've found, in a lot of ways, learning to be a web developer is like being a toddler again. I am suddenly, learning how to get myself around, bumping and toddling through the command line, learning to paint with my fingers all over -- using HTML and CSS to create a pretty picture of my program and I'm learning how to communicate in a new way.

Crawling with my hands   
My fingers are moving in new ways these days as I explore corners of my keyboard that I rarely touched before.  Holding down shift with one pinky while I bend the other towards the  "<" or "}" is a bit like a game twister for my digits. And like twister, it's a struggle, but its still fun. Using keyboard short cuts (command S, command shift 7, command control j etc) and typing in the command line feel unnatural. Pushing my work to git hub and pulling work back is a bit confusing, but it's exciting. Every day I feel like I'm doing things faster. Better. And I'm able to do things I never knew were possible before.

Finger-painting
HTML and CSS seem to be the least efficient aspect of web development. I doubt even the best developer or web designer realizes their vision for a page without a little tinkering to their code.  It's hard to picture exactly what something will look like when you're just typing words on a page so you do you best and then you tweak it. Adding just a bit more padding or trying a different font until all of the code that you've bent your mind working on looks just so. Nit picking is the opposite of efficiency, but at the end of the day, its the shit that sells. The end game of what I am doing when I write a program is to sell it to others-- make it accessible and appealing to people who may or may not know anything about programming. And that is about psychology-- not necessarily science.

Learning my first words
I've always loved words. Written and spoken language gives humans power beyond that of any other animals on earth. And computer languages are an evolution of language that further increase our capabilities.

There are many "languages" in programming, but programming in general is a way of hewing mathematics, logic and language together. The syntax and command words used in the various programming languages (C, Java, C++, Javascript, Ruby etc) are different, but the way every computer language is designed is based on logic-- unlike English (or any other language I'm sure). In the English language there are arbitrary conventions, redundancies and exceptions to rules that make mastery of the language an arduous task. But in computing, as long as you understand logic and learn a few basic "phrases", you can quickly and easily pick up a second or third language.

And to me, programming is beautiful. In prose and poetry, the striking lines and phrases are the ones that convey something that is both honest and poignant in the most stripped down basic language possible. Flowery language is cheesy. Bullshit. In coding there is no room for bullshit; there is only logic.

There are only a few unique commands in each programming language, but there are infinite possibilities of what you can say with them. Everything is intentional. Moving a parenthesis can completely change the meaning of a bit of code, the way breaking a line in a poem can change it's meaning. I love that. It's a challenge because you have to always be attentive to detail while you  code, but when you do it right, you can speak volumes on every single line..

A picture is worth a thousand words, but a well written function can be worth ten times as much.

My code today is my first attempt at incorporating all of my burgeoning skills at once. An interactive web site that I've pushed to git hub and pulled back again.
PetSittingLikeABoss