First email I wrote to Joanna but never finished #work in progress
Hello Joanna, and thank you Ryan, My name is Bailey Johnson and I've been living in the Denver area since 2012. I was living with a family friend in the Capitol Hill area and then in Cherry Creek North/Glendale with my grandmother and recently moved into my own apartment in Lowry. I had heard of Galvanize by looking at Meetups and events in the area to learn Ruby on Rails, along with DaVinci Coders in Louisville, and some others which were suggested to me such as Ruby on Beer, DeRailed and the Full Stack meetup. I got these suggestions when I was talking to a woman named Riley who I had been asking about Women who Code and also about being/identifying transgender based on this caveat from the Women who Code meetup page "Events are intended for people who identify as women women unless otherwise noted and are always open to trans gender." And on their Code of Conduct "All events are intended for people who identify as female or transgender. Men are encouraged to attend only when noted on a specific event." I informed her that I was questioning my sexuality but since I haven't gone through a transition or started openly identifying myself as a woman to my family and friends and other acquaintances full time she said it would not be an appropriate time for me to come unless I was already embracing my transgender status as my only identity, such as on a job application or being referred to only by the female pronoun, and so on. She did give me the list of other meetups I have mentioned, however. She also suggested that I enroll in Thoughtbot Learn, which I have done since. I have worked through a lot of their Ruby on Rails related material. Last year I was part of a Web Dev Cohort of Rampup, also based out of Boston. I was the first, (and only, as far as I know) student to be allowed to do this via Skype, as I was living in Denver and part time at a hostel in San Francisco last year. I ended up at the hostel after attending Dreamforce 2013, which was my fourth Salesforce event. I got to go for free on a developer pass, after attending a developer only Salesforce event in New York City in fall of 2013 called Elevate. So far, I think Elevate was the event I learned the most from because we spent the entire two days actually making example apps and learning about the Salesforce code ecosystem such as Apex, Visualforce and SOQL/SOSL, as opposed to other events where we mostly heard from different panels and keynote speakers. Originally I had attended Cloudforce in New York in 2011, which was more like a smaller version of their annual Dreamforce. I also attended their Customer Company Tour in Toronto in June of 2013, which was again, similar to Cloudforce and Dreamforce. At Dreamforce I was most impressed by being in the live audience of the CEO of Yahoo, Marissa Mayer's keynote with Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff. I also attended a session called Business Agility - The Evolution of IT, which inspired me to learn more about the subjects of Agile and Lean and so on and eventually to become interested in test automation. I was also offered a few jobs at this event, such as with Redkite, a financial outfit, and Sunquest Info, but I then spent most of the year living in San Francisco at the hostel instead, doing Rampup from there, and the downtown library. Other than Salesforce events I have also attended a Parallels Summit, which had some really great forward thinking keynotes mentioning some really far out concepts such as futuristic experiments that are actually going on today. Unfortunately, by contrast, I have not been able to make it to meetups in the Denver area due to my only transportation thus far being a moped, and having some problems with that as my main form of transportation. So, one of the main things I will be looking at in order to enable me to get to gSchool and other meetups in general at Galvanize is finding a new source of transportation. I have recently become more familiar with the bus system, as well, as my moped is temporarily out of service (due to several inconveniences such as faulty electronics with the lights and then the ignition), so I had to develop my skill as a bus patron in order to do some shopping trips for setting up my new apartment after moving in October. Now, I have gone through the application process for a couple of programs, namely Startup Institute in Boston, which I applied to multiple times without being accepted, but at that time I had very little hands on coding experience. Instead I was accepted to Rampup, after being referred to them by the people who saw my applications for Startup Institute, and suggested I do that program first. I am mentioning this due to my questions regarding the gSchool application process and also the process of acquiring a scholarship. When I applied to Startup Institute the first time, it was May of 2013. I had an interview with a member of their team and out of that interview that we conducted I was assigned a project based on my interests as stated in my answers to their questions. I went ahead and created a "free comic books reading room", which was very fun indeed but presented a few challenges for someone who had never done this kind of code. Setting up the basic layout of the "room" page was no problem for me, as I have had some experience with HTML web pages going all the way back to middle school, but there were requirements on top of that which brought out the programmer side of me and had me staying up all night determined to read every answer on Stackoverflow and Stackexchange until I had done it myself. I also read Why's Poignant Guide to Ruby at this time, which I had already seen excerpts of in something like an anthology of the best programming pieces ever written, which I had picked up for some casual reading. I'm searching for the name of that book because I was pretty sure I had mentioned it in my conversations with Startup Institute but it's definitely at one of our Denver library branches. Anyway, after some long nights of installing and setting up a local Ruby/Rails environment, signing up for GitHub and Heroku... I finally was able to push my app to GitHub and Heroku, where I could share it from, which had been my major stumbling block, after doing the other steps of uploading the PDF versions of free comic books, which I had found and downloaded myself, to my new AWS free tier S3 bucket... and putting them into the "free comic books reading room" with a Rails project where I used some code called an <iframe> in order to display all the PDF's on one page. Another thing which they wanted me to do, using the gem for Twitter Bootstrap, was make these appear in modals and I attempted that but never got that far. They also wanted me to use Struts 2 instead of Rails but I didn't then and I've only kept that as a goal to eventually get to, as I was just so proud of being able to get the app that I was able to see for days and weeks on my localhost:3000 finally on to Heroku where I could share it with others. The app is still here at http://thoughtbot.herokuapp.com/ but as you will see the modals I attempted to implement are not functionally there.
