The Hackbright application is a bit on the longer side. In addition to basic information, I had to answer two short essay questions. One question was why I wanted to attend Hackbright. The other question asked me to teach something. I think the main purpose of the second question was to see my interests and my ability to explain concepts to others.

After sending in my application, I completed a coding challenge. The problem wasn’t too difficult. If you’ve done the easy challenges on Coderbyte, then you’ll be all set. Plus, the challenge is not timed.

After 10 days, I got an invitation for a first round interview. The interview was done through an interviewing app, which was interesting. I didn’t talk to an actual person. Instead, I read each question, had about 30 seconds to prepare, and then spoke into the video camera for about 1 minute. The interview was mostly non-technical. I think it was mostly a way to see my personality and whether I would be a cultural fit at Hackbright. I wouldn’t worry too much about this interview. The questions aren’t too difficult, and you can’t really prepare for them. The most difficult thing was getting used to using the app. When I was answering questions, I had to look at the question, check how much time I had left, and make sure to look into the camera while answering my question. I was given some practice questions to do before the interview, so I’d definitely recommend doing those  to get used to the software.

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

This week we had a lab where we took everything we’ve learned thus far and put it to work! We paired with the same partner all week and built a movie ratings application from top to bottom.

The experience was as challenging as it was fun. My pair and I had worked together once before, and I thought we were great at keeping each other on track while also being able to explore and learn during the process. 

Patience, kindness and knowing when to ask for help were highlights of pair programming this week.

This week we were all also very anxious to get our projects started, but first we had to learn about SQLAlchemy, data modeling, APIs and testing.

We were able to finish the lab and have a functioning predictive ratings algorithm for movies. It looked like something out of 1995, but it worked!

The first week was a gentle introduction to the programming world. The instructors gave lectures on how to pair program (more on that later) and on “how to Hackbright”. They emphasized trusting the process and the curriculum, being kind to yourself and stretching your intellectual boundaries.

Much of this week was a review of things I had studied on my own through Codecademy, Zed Shaw’s Learn Python the Hard Way and O’Reilly’s How to Think like a Computer Scientist.

It was invaluable to have seen some of this material before starting the fellowship. It was like visiting a city you love for the third time. You’ve seen all the touristy things, so this time you can dig in on the local spots and appreciate the city for its details.

Seeing Python before and understanding how to use the command line also helped me focus on things I hadn’t done before: using Git & Github and understanding how computer memory works.

Having a properly organized and professional Git repo for projects is a must - for employers who will be looking at your repository, for other developers who will be looking at your code and for yourself.

One basic principle for many coding languages that blew people’s minds was return vs. print.

Ultimately, print is for people. Return is for the program. If there were no people, there would be no reason to have print statements (the instructor may have said something along the lines of “That would be an ideal world.”)

One thing I didn’t get to dig deeper on is the concept of lambda functions. Taking some time to review, they look pretty useful for writing clean code when you need an anonymous function that will be used only once.

Other concepts that were great to cement understanding are just how interestingly Python is designed. As an example, for loops in Python know what you’re iterating through (such as a list, dictionary, etc). In JS it’s a bit more explicit IMO, since you have your initialization statement, a condition to check and a statement to run at the bottom of the loop:

In Python, you just have:

This introduced the idea of writing “Pythonic” code, and I see it all the time now. Your code might work, but it may not be using the syntax that makes it pythonic. 

Being able to unpack lists is also something that comes in handy and makes for cleaner code. Rule of thumb: if something is iterable, you can unpack it.

How computer memory works completely blew my mind. The difference between checking equality (==) and checking identity (is) was a helpful concept to learn, too. Two variables may have the same value, so checking a == b may come out to True. But, the values of a and b occupy different spaces in memory. Crazy, right?

Comprehensions are something I hadn’t seen much of before. They are another example of pythonic syntax and allow for fun ways to cut down on lines of code. That said, for now I find it preferable (and clearer) to write out what the comprehension is representing.

Happy Halloween!

Six weeks ago I started a fellowship in software engineering at Hackbright Academy, a 12-week intensive program for women in San Francisco. 

It has been both a whirlwind and an experience of a lifetime. The women in the program are badass - intelligent as hell, witty, hilarious, beautiful and incredibly kind.  

The instructors are so knowledgeable and care about HB’s mission to #changetheratio. Most of all, they do everything they can to make sure we gain the skills and foundation for lifelong learning.

Before we begin our projects next week, I wanted to review what I’ve learned so far and write about it along the way.

This is mostly for my own memory hoarding purposes, but perhaps this will be the push a woman thinking about a career in software engineering needs. Or maybe it will inspire an experienced professional to be a mentor at Hackbright.

There were a lot of factors that led me to dive into this world and I have a lot of people to thank. And I will. But today I am going to thank the dev who made the flying ninja on Mission Chinese Food’s website. You’re awesome.

We looked at regular expressions today which means that 8 years later, I finally understand this comic.