#coding house

Two weeks have gone by at coding house and the first phase will wrap up today. It's definitely been a crazy couple weeks and I've got a lot done. Instead of describing everything I think a quick list is in order:

-went through 30 days of jQuery

-Learned and implemented local storage

-Introduced to Firebase and have used it as the database for our first two major projects.  Managing sessions and login with password and email.

-Introduction to JIRA, a project management system. Not a huge fan,but I can understand how in a big organization it would be helpful

-More in depth knowledge of git.  Came in with a lot of knowledge but Git Immersion taught me a lot of new techniques and habits to get into.

Our second project is due today and is mostly done except for a few minor bugs we need to fix with the login and admin registration. I spent the last couple of days building a lot of the javascript logic behind the forms and data visualization.  Our project lead chose to use Charts.js and although it looks nice: 

I wish we would have been able to use D3 as I only have had a couple of hours to play around with that library and I've seen a lot of companies using D3 for data visualization.  Hopefully in the next project I'll be able to include some of it.

Yesterday was my birthday and a lot has happened here at coding house! We have been working on a new project that will help us track our social media duties per day, and the plan is to use the D3 library to visualize our statistics over time. For the first project we were divided into two teams of three people each but for this project all six of us are collaborating.  To prepare us for team collaboration, coding house introduced JIRA, a task manager, and we spent a while figuring out how to divide up the tasks and estimate our time to complete each one.  

To start my birthday off we had yoga in the morning and it felt amazing to get that kind of stretch and strength training in.  Our instructor has a good balance of hybrid exercises and while they never seem impossible, they definitely require dexterity, strength, and endurance.  Especially the portion where we do 60 push-ups split between bridges and planks, whew!

Since we have six people working on this project we decided it would be good to pair program tasks and my partner is Aleks, the guy from Denmark.  We made a lot of progress in the morning but then got stuck on a problem with firebase, a data service we are using for logging in, controlling sessions, and storing our data.  The problem for us occurred when we were trying to load previous data into our variables.  The confusion stemmed from firebase's reliance on event based data-reads.  So, instead of us being able to just say, hey we want data from X table, we have to create a callback function that reads data based when an event occurs.  The curious part was that our program was working, as long as we didn't redirect the user after they submit their information. Long story short, our script was correct, but we were only triggering it when we clicked on the submit button, and the script needs to occur both when the page loads AND when the user submits their information (to detect if there are any changes in the database). The solution was to copy the portion of the script and paste it into the document.ready function.  As much as it was frustrating, I can't be mad because little things happen like this in programming all the time, and it requires patience and logical thinking to overcome seemingly trivial bugs like this.

Halfway through this bug the doorbell rang and it was a special delivery for me from my girlfriend! She had found a really good cupcake bakery near our house and ordered strawberry and cookie butter cupcakes.  They were amazing, I highly recommend cookie butter on anything! We continued to work and finally got to a spot where we were happy, and right after we fixed the bug, dinner was ready! I requested the chef make pad thai as I haven't had thai food since we've been here.  She seemed hesitant at first because she has never made it, but it was amazing! She really outdid herself, including baking me a cake along with cookies and cream ice cream. We all celebrated by devouring the cake and then playing games the rest of the night.  All in all a great birthday, but I can't wait to head back to my apartment in the city on sunday and spend time with my girlfriend.

I arrived at coding house last night and had a great time. Nick explained the mission, introduced us to what we'd be doing and how to maximize our time while living here.  We discussed who we are, what we want to do, and ideas for moving forward.  It was great hearing how many members of my cohort already had ideas for projects they wanted to work on as well as getting feedback on the few project ideas I came up with.  After everyone dispersed to work on prepping for the week, John and I watched the season finale of game of thrones to unwind before starting what we knew would be an intense first week.  I ended up going to bed past midnight and normally I would sleep in when going to bed this late, but I was surprised when I woke up without an alarm at 6 am this morning.

The reason it was so surprising is that I'm normally not a morning person, but something about gearing up for 60 days of straight coding must have riled me up. Without waiting, I launched up the folder for my website redesign and ended up getting a lot of work done with the jQuery part of my portfolio.  My goal is to completely re-design my website from scratch using bootstrap+jQuery.  I considered using AngularJS as I worked on a previous project with it, but our teacher Oswald today mentioned how you should use the right tools for the job and Angular would be overkill for what I want to accomplish.  I'm excited to get into the bulk of the jQuery work I have to do which will involve transitioning from project to project, detaching and re-adding elements to the DOM, and adding subtle animations to give it a more modern feel.

After everyone woke up and we ate breakfast we went hiking at mission peak, a hike I have often heard about living in SF but was never able to go to due to it being all the way down here in Fremont. Since we left a little late we decided not to hike to the top which normally I would be a little bummed, but I am still sore from playing soccer yesterday so it was the right amount of stretching and exercise for me.

After we got back we did some tutorials and went through the basics of html5 and css3, most of which was review for me but it was interesting to see how a professional defined some of the basic terms in a new way. After tacos for lunch Oswald sat down at my computer and gave a whirlwind of information on Unix all while blazing through the command line.  I think he was intentionally trying to show us how much there is to know as I felt really overwhelmed even though I have some experience with it.  

The most exciting part of the day was signing up for a hackathon. Lincoln Labs is putting it on and there's a $10,000 prize! Needless to say I hope to have enough skills to create a quality entry, but really I'm just excited to attend one.

At dinner Nick asked us about what we wanted our final projects to be as well as the types of companies we'd want to work for. I've been asked this question a lot and it never ceases to stump me. Obviously somewhere awesome! Well, to me it doesn't matter all that much as long as the product/mission really resonates with me and there are senior devs who would challenge and help me grow as a developer.