#gracehopperacademy

In the 4 weeks before starting Grace Hopper, I completed Grace Hopper’s remote prep course called Foundations. The course covers basic and intermediate Javascript, HTML, CSS, and jQuery. After learning key concepts, I created a basic app.

I think I over-prepared a bit for my interview, so most of the concepts were review for me. If you find that this is the case for you, I would recommend spending any free time you have before your bootcamp sharpening your vanilla Javascript skills by doing challenges on Codewars.

After hearing back from all the bootcamps I applied to, it was time to make a decision. I sent follow-up emails to all of the schools. I received quick responses from Coding Dojo, Hackbright, and Grace Hopper. I never heard back from Hack Reactor. I also spoke with Shanna, Grace Hopper’s dean, on Skype. It’s something they set up for all admitted students.

My decision came down to Grace Hopper and Hack Reactor. While Hack Reactor seemed like a great school, and I would have preferred going to San Francisco, it seemed like Hack Reactor was growing at a really rapid rate. Soon after I was accepted, Hack Reactor announced the rebranding of their other schools, MakerSquare and Telegraph Academy, as Hack Reactor schools. I felt that this would bring down the name brand of Hack Reactor in San Francisco. I also read reviews by people that described the school as a sink-or-swim environment and and their experience as feeling like a cog in the wheel. With all these misgivings, I couldn’t justify paying $20,000 upfront for Hack Reactor.

As for Grace Hopper, I really liked the idea of being at a women’s school. The tuition was also high, but I liked that I could defer payment until I secured a job. From my interview and from reading reviews, I got the sense that Grace Hopper would be a positive and supportive environment. I was not as excited about the idea of moving to New York, and for that reason, I was still hesitant on choosing Grace Hopper.

The Grace Hopper application was on the longer side. In addition to basic information, I also had to provide a resume, educational background, and standardized test scores. There were around 3 short essay questions that were pretty straightforward.

Three days later, I was invited to do an online coding challenge. Coderbyte and Codewars were a great help for preparing for the challenge. The challenge lasted an hour and consisted of 5 problems that increased in difficulty. I was able to complete 4/5 of the problems. I was close to finishing the last problem but didn’t have enough time to complete it. I ended up completing it on my own after the challenge. I also found a more elegant way to solve the problem on Stack Overflow.

Three days later, I was invited to interview! The first part of the interview was non-technical but still related to my experience learning to code. The second part was the live coding session. I felt much more relaxed during this session than I did in my Hack Reactor Interview. We did a couple of coding problems. For the second problem, my interviewer and I worked together to refactor the original solution I had written. I had to get some hints along the way but was able to finish eventually. Interviewing with Grace Hopper was the best interview experience I had out of all the bootcamps I applied to. My interviewer was very friendly and made me feel comfortable, and I felt like I learned something new from the live coding.

I chose to apply to 4 coding bootcamps:

Coding Dojo

Hackbright

Hack Reactor

Fullstack’s Grace Hopper Program

Coding Dojo

I knew a couple of people who went to this school and ended up working as developers. The school teaches 3 tech stacks, rather than just one. The tuition is also cheaper than other schools. The application curriculum seemed to be less rigorous than other schools, but I decided to apply to have a fallback school just in case.

Hackbright

Hackbright is a bootcamp for women. I was interested in going to an all-women’s school due to the low number of women in tech. The schools seemed to have a strong network with ties to a lot of companies in the Bay Area. However, it seemed the school was aimed at students with very little background in coding, and I already had some experience.

Hack Reactor

Hack Reactor has great outcomes for hiring rate and average salary. It seems that it is one of the best coding schools, and it had a lot of great reviews online. The  school requires applicants to have some knowledge of Javascript, which I liked. I had my reservations, though, because the school seems to be growing very rapidly. Currently, two cohorts of 35 students enter at one time. Cohorts attend lectures together, and the idea of listening to a lecture with 70 students reminded me too much of college lectures.

Grace Hopper

//note: I applied for 2017 February Cohort in December 2016//

These are just some of my personal thoughts about my application and what led to the acceptance. Since there aren’t many blog posts out there about the experience at GHA (since it’s a new program at this time, just a year old), I decided I should give it a try. I can’t promise that everyone’s application process will be the same (I’m only one person after all), but I hope it helps somebody. 

I’m officially graduated from Grace Hopper Academy! It’s incredibly bittersweet. I’m super proud of myself, and of every amazing woman in our cohort. But I’m also really sad to be leaving NYC! And then, of course, excited to be going home to the Bay Area, and to start the hunt for my next exciting job opportunity. I’m approaching job hunting very differently this time around. I’m really just trying to network and meet with as many people as possible. I’m not just looking for a job - I’m looking for a company I really care about, whose mission I feel aligned with. But it’s also really excited to know that the skills I have at this point are valuable, and that I can make a huge difference anywhere I end up. My list of dream companies is daunting but exciting. For now, I’m keeping the list pretty short, and I’m only looking into companies that I feel very passionate about. That may change with time (and rejections... don’t remind me) but for now, I’ve realized the best use of my energy is to only throw myself into the application process for companies that I feel really motivated to join. But in the meantime, I’m also really open to discovering new companies I may have never heard of, especially if they’re small startups. In reflecting back on my time at Grace Hopper, I’ve had so many discoveries along the way, and I thought I’d share some of my “revelations” here, in no particular order. Also these are all opinions, and subject to change with time.

1. I love backend programming! I’m still as crazy about APIs as I ever was, and I also have really enjoyed learning a lot about working with NoSQL databases, ORMs/ODMs. This shouldn’t strike me as a surprise, given my background in network technology, but I just thought that I would be more psyched about front-end when I entered the program. I was just way wrong about this.

2. I love Angular. It makes creating a web application so easy! It’s really nice to work with a tool that takes care of the architecture problem for you. Being so opinionated, it’s really clear whether you’re doing something the “right” way in this framework.

3. I also sometimes hate Angular. It can make web application maintenance so hard... and it’s very opinionated, so whenever I find myself not wanting to do something the “Angular way” I sometimes feel constrained.

4. I’m actually kind of good at front-end at this point... didn’t expect this, but I’ve been discovering that I know a lot more HTML/CSS than I thought I did. I guess this makes sense, since I’ve been learning HTML/CSS the longest of any language I’ve been working with. But it’s such a slow process to get good, particularly with CSS, that it sort of snuck up on me that I don’t find it completely insane to position things on the page anymore.

5. Bootstrap can be super useful - especially when time is very constrained. I was very hesitant to use Bootstrap, mostly because I think it creates less semantic markup, what with all the class names everywhere and oh so many divs. But actually, when you’re really strapped for time (ha, no pun intended) being able to rapidly prototype the HTML using Bootstrap is kind of invaluable. It also takes care of some of the nastier responsive design issues for you, which can be a godsend in moments of chaos.

6. Flexbox is awesome. I’m seriously a huge fan.

7. I’m a full stack engineer! As much as I’ve discovered how much I enjoy back-end code, and also that I feel pretty solid with front-end and this point - the fact is, I really enjoy a diverse set of tasks when I’m working on a project. I’m really excited that I have the ability to work across the entire stack. It makes me feel empowered - and I feel like working as a full stack developer will allow me the kind of variety I crave in my work.

8. I am a perpetual student. I am seriously having to fight the urge to just take more classes instead of job hunting! I was worried that after this program, I might feel done learning new programming concepts - but mostly, I feel like I’ve been using JavaScript only for 4 months and I want to get back to the Python & Ruby, and maybe learn some new languages and frameworks - Django? React? There’s just so much out there!

Life has been crazy, guys! Boy, it's been nuts. What a wild couple of weeks it's been - very little time to stop and take stock. But I thought I'd share a little bit of what's been happening in the past 2 weeks.

StackStore - eCommerce Site

Working with in groups of 3-4, we created our first fully featured fullstack application using the MEAN stack. The project, StackStore, was designed to solidify our knowledge of authentication, session, local storage, and just what it's like to work on a team on a larger project. While it was a pretty grueling few days, we came out the other end with a mock online store. With a little more time, we would also have liked to integrate the Stripe API for payment processing, but we were really focused on a couple of key features - in particular, making the cart persist for both users and guests, as well as implementing powerful front-end filtering of our list of product. The project was difficult, but ultimately really satisfying. The greatest challenge for my group was losing traction over the weekend. We all worked a lot over the weekend, but when the week started and we were all in the same place, it was hard to review and integrate everyone's code in a timely fashion in order to finalize the rest of the app. In retrospect, I see how it would have been useful to make more and smaller branches. We learned a lot about the challenges of working remotely, and also making sure to communicate well as a team. All in all, I think the project was a success - and it was really nice to be working on a project with a team for the first time in the program. I haven't worked with a real team of people since I left A10 Networks about a year ago - and honestly working with a super amazing team is the thing I miss most from that job. (Seriously, shoutout to A10 TechPubs - they're awesome)

Stackathon

Created my first full-fledged independent project: SuperGender.

It was quite a doosy, and required 4 straight days of pretty much non-stop coding. (Also I was coding right up until the presentation.)

So what is SuperGender? Basically, I analyzed data from 100,000+ comic book characters from the Comic Vine API to determine some interesting gender-related trends in comic books. In particular, I was able to analyze the gender breakdown of characters, the average number of issues per character (broken down by gender), the top 10 origins (Human, Alien, Mutant, etc) of each gender, and the top 10 first name/title of character alter egos.

It was a really interesting and surprisingly difficult process. In order to analyze the Comic Vine API in a timely and dependable fashion, I created 2 scripts - one to query the /characters route for all characters and save them to MongoDB, and another to process all of the data and analyze it in order to seed stats objects on MongoDB as well. This meant that I was able to easily serve up all of my statistics without too much latency, and that the user on the front-end can filter statistics by Publisher. Right now, I've implemented filters for the major publishers (Marvel, DC Comics, Disney, Dark Horse Comics & Image Comics) - but in the future, I'm planning to add a search/dropdown to find data from any of the hundreds of publishers in my data.

Other improvements I'm planning include analyzing number of deaths per character by gender, adding filters for creation year of the character (this could highlight some interesting trends), analyzing the genders of friends/foes of characters by gender, and analyzing the gender breakdown of various superhero teams. I'm also curious about ways I might be able to use vision APIs to analyze skin coverage of male v. female characters.

By the way, I really love comics! I've been super excited about the new trend of making comics more inclusive. Between the new Captain Marvel, Thor, Ms. Marvel, and Batgirl, it's a pretty excited time to be a woman or girl who reads comics.

If you'd like to take a look at the code that I wrote to do all of this, feel free to check out the github repo. Would love comments and suggestions if you have any! It actually takes a long time to seed the DB, so I ended up creating the ability to seed in batches.

Tech Talk

I presented my mini tech talk to my fellow GHA classmates today, and had a great time! I talked a little bit about how to get a Phaser game started with a simple walkthrough. You can check out the demo and slides here. It was a bit nerve-wracking preparing to speak in front of everyone - the hackathon project took a lot out of me. But I'm glad I took the time to get familiar with Phaser. I was really happily surprsied at how easy it is to work with, and I'm looking forward to playing around with it and making some fun, nerdy games with it in the future.

Capstone

And now we're in the final phase of the program - capstone. We're still in the planning phases, and haven't 100% settled on an idea. But we have a good one cooking that we're pretty sure we want to go with. More on that as it unfolds... for now, let's just say it combines music and tech. We're still closing in on our exact project, but it's starting to seem like a lot of fun! Looking forward to sharing it in a few weeks when I (gasp) finish up the program? Just 3 more weeks!