Layne McNish

My hackathon team, with a fellow former gSchool, created a fun project called Eatlun.ch for Slashrocket’s hackathon and we were voted number one by the Slashrocket community!  Our project was a React on Rails app that will let you choose a location and max price and it will choose your lunch destination for you.  We nearly had it working to choose a menu item with Locu’s API but ran out of time.  I’d love to work on this project again and to make it into a Slack robot, just for fun.

Here are a few of my favorite talks:

My team won 2nd place at the We Code Hackathon that Puppet Labs and Nike put on this weekend.  

We made a job searching app that tries to bring together finding a job that fits your skills but also fits your life.  We used Yelp, Google Maps and Glassdoor APIs to find reviews for local childcare, transit directions and reviews from current employees.  We pulled the job listings by parsing XML from StackOverflow’s jobs RSS feed.  You can check it out here: https://wecodehackathon.herokuapp.com/

I was given the opportunity to tell USA Today what my experience has been as a woman in tech so far.  Learning to code has changed my life in many ways and it was a pleasure to share that with others.  

I hope it will show other women that switching careers, learning new skills and pursuing happiness in your life by straying from your current path is totally doable and worth it.  

This week featured another O(n²) algorithm: insertion sort.

Like bubblesort which I discussed last week, insertion sort is an O(n²) sorting function that moves each element one at a time into the proper position.

Insertion sort does exactly what the name says, it inserts one element at a time into the previously sorted part of the array, moving elements of a higher value towards the end of the array as needed.

The first element of the unsorted array is always considered to be sorted and it steps through one at a time adding another element to the sorted array, comparing and swapping until the inner array is sorted before moving onto the next element in the array.

You can view the code below or check it out on Github.

As we get closer to finishing gSchool, a few of us decided to start a study group to work on languages, algorithms, interview questions and other topics that we haven't learned during class yet.

Today, we had a special guest come in to help us talk through, whiteboard and code algorithms.  This week's algorithm was bubble sort.

First we talked through what the algorithm did to sort an array, next we moved onto sudo coding it on the whiteboard.  Lastly, we wrote a quick program to help us translate what we just learned to Ruby.  It could definitely use a bit of refactoring but for now, it works.

class Numbers def bubble_sort(array) L = array.length while L >= 0 I = 0 swapped = false while I < (L-1) if array[I] > array[I + 1] array[I], array[I+1] = array[I+1], array[I] swapped = true end I = I + 1 end break if swapped == false L = L -1 end array end end

You can check out the full code here. I'll probably update it for each algorithm and exercise we go through.

Last night, we got the opportunity to show off the apps we've spent the last month working on.  I presented my app, WalkSafe.ly, which I've built to help people find the safest walking route using crime data.  The presentations ended up being tons of fun and many people came up afterwards to discuss the next steps I'd like to take with my app.  

They also offered up some really great ideas that I would love to implement in the next phases of my project such as a deadman switch, GPS tracking, make it mobile friendly, and the ability to share your route with a friend so they know you got to your destination safely.

What is ObjectSpace?

The ObjectSpace module contains a number of routines that interact with the garbage collection facility and allow you to traverse all living objects with an iterator.

ObjectSpace also provides support for object finalizers, procs that will be called when a specific object is about to be destroyed by garbage collection.

Garbage Collectors

A garbage collector is a construct in languages with managed memory. 

It is the thing that manages the memory. 

Essentially, it's the job of the garbage collector to figure out when a piece of memory that has been allocated is no longer needed, and deallocate it.

Why do you need to keep track of this?

When you're using a language with a garbage collector, there are certain things you might want to do:

Run a method whenever a piece of memory is freed

Count all instances of a class that are currently taking up memory

Count all instances of all classes

ObjectSpace gives you access to do things of this nature. Essentially, it's a way to get access to anything and everything that's currently using allocated memory.

One of the many advantages of dynamic languages such as Ruby is the ability to introspect—to examine aspects of the program from within the program itself.

Simple explanation: we use introspection to examine parts of our programs that aren't normally visible from where we stand.

What does this allow us to learn about our program?

We might discover:

What objects it contains

The current class hierarchy

The contents and behaviors of objects

Information on methods

I can't believe it's already August!  Since I last wrote, we have started learning Rails, attended Develop Denver where my hackathon team used an API for the first time to make an app that finds beer related gifs, went rock climbing and many other things.  This summer is just flying by.

 Coming up soon, we'll cover Javascript, I'll go on a weekend kayaking trip with the Bold Betties, I'll visit Oklahoma for a long weekend, and I'll move to a new apartment when Breannan finally gets here.

Made it to the end of week 5!  This week actually felt pretty great.  We spent the week going over SQL and databases which turned out to be very interesting.  This was definitely the first week where I felt like I was starting to understand the topics we're going over.  

My pairing partner and I are working on a web app called Fishbook as an exercise.  So far in the app, you can register as a new user, log in, see who else is a user, add lists of your favorite fish with their wikipedia pages, and see what fish the other users have added.  Sounds totally lame but it's been really fun to put together so far.  If you want to check it out and make lists of your favorite fish (which I know you all do), you can visit Fishbook here: http://immense-wave-6838.herokuapp.com/  So far, flounder and goldfish seem to be the most popular fish.

Other things I've done this week:  Denver.rb where I listened to a couple talks on TDD by Jeffrey Matthias (@idlehands) and why testing is important and apprenticeships.  The apprenticeship talk was by Dave Hoover (@davehoover) from Dev Bootcamp in Chicago discussing his experience establishing apprenticeship programs at the companies he's worked for and what made the programs either successful or unsustainable.  Coming to the talk as someone who wants an apprenticeship, it was really interesting to hear about it from the other side.  I'm still mulling over what my options are for after gSchool and what I'd like to do but I think that I would be very interested in an apprenticeship, especially if I'll have some time to kill between when I finish and when B finishes school.  

I can't believe how quickly gSchool is moving along!  Last week was a short week due to the holiday.  We mainly focused on sessions, Sinatra, Heroku & Capybara tests.  My pairing partner and I labored over our Sinatra app for hours but finally made it work, thank God.  

Onto happier things, yesterday was my 3 year anniversary with my boyfriend.  He came into town to visit for the holiday weekend.  He ended up being delayed by a day due to SW airlines canceling all the flights on the third because of storms. Super annoying!  We spent the weekend hanging with friends, doing the full walking tour of Denver, eating to our hearts' content and catching up after a month apart.  It was really hard saying goodbye this morning but the lucky jerk is off to the South of France for a week, not that I'm jealous or anything!

This week, we moved from all Ruby all the time to adding in some new elements.  We briefly touched on HTML & CSS early in the week before having our brains completely overloaded with Sinatra & Heroku yesterday.  We launched our first web apps which was pretty interesting.  I have to admit that the Sinatra day was very overwhelming and hard to understand but I think that once we go over it some more, it will be easier to grasp.  I want post the link to the app I made but it basically was a sortable list of pugs and a gif of Ron Swanson throwing his computer in the garbage.

I think that we're all struggling with the concept that we won't ever be able to know everything that there is to know.  In school, you get used to learning a subject, taking tests, and feeling pretty confident about the amount you know.  With this, everything we learn makes us realize that there are infinite other things we can also learn and do.  It's exciting and scary all at the same time.

This weekend is looking to be pretty fun.  I think I'm meeting up with a friend from high school to go hiking and to taco festival.  Mmm tacos.  We also have a study group & nerdy book club on Sunday at school which is hopefully pretty helpful.