Learning through Doing

Wow! It has been a while since I have updated this. I guess I broke my promise of updating this and not abandoning it. But I have to say that I do not regret it. 

I have been busy at work and learning different things. Surprisingly I have been teaching things as well to some co-workers. Mainly how to work to deliver an MVP. How to work using agile and some other aspects. Unfortunately we do not work Agile here even though we have been trying to move there. 

I think there are many wheels turning that people are forgetting what and how to set up their teams. Today was the first time that I opened up my ruby dev kit and coded a bit, or tried to. This actually made me a bit sad because I miss using ruby and some things were not readily available in my mind. Once I searched for some instructions things started clicking so what I will be trying to do is start helping in the open source community and practice some of my skills. 

I have been Helping a friend to decide what he wants to do with his life but I have not been doing a great job at it. Mostly because I am not sure what he wants and I do not want to lead him to something he will regret later on. I think I will have to start asking questions that will lead him to coming up to his decisions. 

Overall my Cohort did really well finding jobs which makes me very happy that most of us got something. 

So I have been in my new job for two weeks now and I have to say that I like it quite a bit. I have been busy learning all new things but I can't say that I do not like it because that is not true. I love learning all the new techs and expanding on my knowledge of front end and c#. I do miss coding ruby but hey, you use the tool you need to get the job done. I am currently thinking of what I want to code for my new project. At the moment I have no ideas which is a bit discouraging. I want to build something fun and useful but at the moment I cannot think of what. 

I probably will not be updating this as often as I do since I am not that big into sharing here but, I keep doing my best. The last thing I want to do is stop posting here before saying goodbye. That would be just as bad as watching a show that gets cancelled without a final episode. Looking at you revolution. Beside it helps me focus a bit to put things here sometimes. 

So I'll come out and say this. I do not code on a MAC. The only time I coded on one was at DBC when I did not code on my laptop. Now I have a windows PC. On my laptop I have a partition with Windows 7 and another partition with Ubuntu 12.04. I do not hate Macs. I think they are decent computers, but very over hyped. I can code very comfortable on my Ubuntu partition and not have any issues. I can easily navigate four desktop screens with a simple touch of a button and use the windows keyboard shortcuts to get to places or open programs. People always assume that I am using windows as my primary coding systems and while that is not true, there is no need to make fun or dis the system. Yeah setting up some things on windows is a bit harder when coding with ruby but once you get it running it works just fine. And actually some of the issues with the setup are well documented so it should not take that long. 

My point of this post is to say that there is no need to make fun, criticize my developing system when all I want to do is come in and learn to code and have fun with new people. This has happened several times to me and others who do not use Macs as their systems and I think it is rude. 

This sort of attitude that I am using an "inferior" system is dumb. I actually take great pleasure when I can show off my skills to some "experienced" devs who have these attitudes and a show them that I can do great things and even be better than them is certain things. 

So the big take away of this ranting post is, Don't be a douche. Lets all just collaborate and learn from each other and leave the who has a better system attitude out the door. 

So I have been lazy and not updating anything here. It has been a couple of weeks since I have been done with DBC I was working on a personal project and applying for jobs. 

The project is almost done but I ran into a couple of issues and since then I have been busy and not working on it. This makes me feel sad, but once I start working on it again I will feel better again. 

My job hunt has been going alright. I have had a couple of interviews and some have gone better than others. I think within a couple of weeks or a month I will have a job which makes me happy. The only issue is me bargaining for money. I have been getting different figures here in the area about how much I could be earning. Right now it seems that I could be making 50-70k. Now my issue is should I settle for 50k or not?

This is a hard thing to decide, because I don't know if I am settling or not, Or should I?

Well today I decided to start a little side project that I thought would be simple, but as it turns out it is not. I am trying to create a chat client in rails. The first issue I came across was that part of the code I was going to use is outdated. So I am refactoring part of it and trying to make it work. The second issue that I do not like is with rails 4 which I am using. The issue is that before if you wanted to access a value in the database you just had to set the attr_accessible in the model. Now you cannot do that. Instead you have to create a private method in the controller that is in charge of that. I am not sure if I like this or not. It seems safer but at the same time my lazy side hates the extra work. 

For now I will keep coding using rails 4 and see if I get used to it. 

BTW if anyone wishes to do any projects and wants help, please let me know. Also if you want to check out my github and see what I am working on go ahead. It is open for anyone. The link is below. 

This will be a short post but I have to say that, I am done with Dev Bootcamp. In a few hours I will be getting my dog tags and I will be congratulated and my life as a junior programmer will officially start. Our group project turned out great and we got great feedback. 

I will miss this place and some of the instructors that influenced me. I made good friends and met many acquaintances but I also learned a lot of skills. I definitely do not regret my experience. 

I did get some bad news. Career week is not starting Tuesday and ending next Monday, rather than being from Monday to Saturday. I am not sure if I can finish it since I was planning on leaving on Sunday. I will be talking to my wife and discuss my decision. I think it is a good idea but at the same time I have plans. Oh well. I will find out. 

It is 12:24 am and feature freeze will be in place in a bit over 8 hours. Our app looks good and behaves ok. It could probably use some more polishing but it is function at least. Now the next two days is mostly re factoring and testing which should be a nice change of pace. We have been sprinting these last three days. Trying to make things work. We have certainly had many frustrating moments. Some of the features broke and others we could not figure out. In the end I feel a lot more confident in my ability to code and deal with any issues that present themselves. I think our group is the one that is most on par. I see some groups who just disappear and never see members working which make me worry that they will not complete their projects.

So first of all, I am almost done. I am seeing the light at the end of the tunnel. A lot of things happened this week though. First of all we basically created jquery from scratch. It was a very basic query such as show, hide and a few other ones but it was cool to demystify jquery. I know most people think jQuery as magic but at the end of the day JQuery is just a module of javascript functions. It was great to put it together and practice javascript coding. I also noticed my skills improving and understanding javascript and ajax.

Related to javascript, I had a conversation with a few cohort mates and an instructor and we discussed our understanding of javascript and also  our proficiency. One of the statements that stuck with me, was the ideology that javascript is in a way a language building language. It is similar to what C is to C++ or Ruby.  Angular and Ember are other frameworks that are built based on Javascript and so is ruby and C+. Angular is an easier framwork to understand that javascript so that is why some people prefer is but it is the same as to why people might like ruby over c. It is easier to access and you do not have to reinvent the wheel. Jquery is all javascript but it compiled together to easily perform one line tasks rather than 5 or more(depending on how dry your code is). Anyway it is a simple idea but it is cool to see things in a different way and not try to think of these frameworks and languages as magical. The only difference a lot have is accessibility and purpose. 

I also started working on the final project with my group. My team is great, especially since most of the members have  been in my previous groups for all my projects. There have been some ups and downs but nothing too bad. I expected some issues to arise but I think thanks to Engineering  Empathy we have been able to discuss issues in a mature and respectful manner. I finally researched emailing capabilities to app users and I am excited that this is my favorite feature I worked on. I think it is really useful and happy I got it working. The only thing that really frustrated me was the Facebook API. Mostly because you have to specify scopes of the info you want and the documentation is not as comfortable as Google's is to me. It works great but it is not my favorite. 

So I have started Phase 3 and so far so good. I am now learning to make the transition from using the sinatra model to using rails for my apps. Today I rewrote my url shortener from sinatra to using rails. The transition was not too painful. In fact most of it went smooth. It was not until I tried using one of my methods that my code broke. The reason for that is that in sinatra I was calling self for my method which in that case it was the attribute I wanted but when I did the same thing in rails, self was the whole object, so that did not work. The fix was easy. I just specified the attribute of my object and used that to get the code up to speed. Now later we will be running some tests, but that should not be too bad. 

I am liking rails overall. The biggest pet peeve is just that it asks us to separate everything even more and if you do not like the rails conventions you are out of luck. But this is not a bad con. In fact I see the benefit because it forces a team to set their project the same. There is little room for error. Make sure to use plural and singular when needed for the objects and files and you will not have issues. Rails documentation is decent as well since now I am able to find everything I need in one spot. I do not know if this comfortableness is coming because of my experience using sinatra or if i am able to find answers faster. Regardless I am appreciating rails and I cannot wait to build more apps with it. 

Have been intense and exciting. I have managed to survive and get great feedback on my performance. Right now we are expected to complete 10 portfolio challenges by the end of the phase next week. So far I have been able to complete 7 1/2. 

Aside from the challenges we are also doing daily challenges in which we do have to complete. This is the biggest difference between phase 1 and 2. Before we were not expected to finish any of the assignments as long as we understood the concepts. Now we do have a set group of challenges to complete before the next day on top of portfolio and group projects. 

I really cannot complain and I am glad I did move on to this phase. My biggest challenge has actually been Javascript, but more precisely OOJ. The reason i struggle with it so much with it is that the language is so flexible that sometimes I struggle identifying the parts of it. It is not like Ruby or C# where you have a clear class named class and methods and so on. A lot of these guys in javascript are defined as functions and they depend on how they are set in order to act differently. But I know what you are thinking, "How is that different from any other language?". Well, it is and it is not. They do have a certain way on how they are set but they can be very hard to spot. For example there are three ways to intanciate a class such as :  function Apple(type){this.type= type} or var o = {} and another way I can't even remember. But the worst part is not this. It is the keyword this. "This" is similar to self but it can get confusing when you have a function within a function and you do not know which object you are referring to at that time. 

I really need to practice with it but thankfully we were told that this next week is basically our slow week for us to use and practice what we need to practice. I hope this does not change though.

I had a few pairing sessions as well and some went better than others. I think we are getting to the point were we are all trying to do the best we can but we forget about others and this causes conflicts and at times we ignore others. My last group was great though. I asked for a volunteer to be a leader and in my opinion that worked. Even though the leader was not that great at least we had a common central point to go to and that would force us to communicate. 

My wife also came to visit this last weekend which was great because I needed a distraction but at the same time I felt bad because I did not give her all the attention she deserved because I was busy working on a group project for a few hours at a time. But she understood which was great and why I love her. 

I also offended someone with a suicide joke, which sort of bugged me because this person is a person with no filter and he got offended about this particular comment. I also felt like he did not think that I respected the action. Which if he knew me... well that is a different story and I do not owe any explanations to him. I did apologize and now I know what his line is. Even if I do not agree with him I respect that he told me. 

Anyway that is it for now. Next week we are done with this phase and we get told to repeat or move on. At this point I am not sure what will happen but I cannot wait to see the end result of our assessments. 

So today we had a few coaches teach us about Sinatra which is a framework for web development. The framework works in a MVC model and it tries to cleary define the model as it is being used. 

Before I continue, I have to give kudos to the coaches because their two hour presentation was great. I felt like I learned a lot!!! After the presentation I feel like I understand and can easily use Sinatra for any challenge we get this week. Now I feel prepared and excited to begin this week. I sort of wish we had more of these presentation where they teach us and let us code along in order to understand the concepts. This is something that was missing in phase one or at least did not feel very prevalent. 

Anyway back to the topic. The framework we used to build our app was great because the it clearly defines all the parts of the MVC. And sinatra makes it easy to understand what and why you are doing what you are doing. We were able to combine ruby and HTML and I saw a lot of posibilties for javascript, CSS and more complex databases. 

After today all I feel worried about which I should have practiced by the time this is published is active-records. This is a concept we brushed last week and I feel like I do not fully understand. I can do parts of it like the validations but I do not quite fully understand the in and outs and even reasoning for the behaviors. But alas I understand Sinatra and understand why it does what it does. I think the only thing I need to watch out with these frame work is how I create and save the files and syntax. There were a few times my program would not work because of a stupid forward-slash or a missing equal sign.  

Remember to use the <% rubycodehere %> syntax when using the views with HTML and add the = sign at the beginning like this <%=  rubycodehere %> when you want something published such as a variable or code block result. 

Everything else is understanding that the framework itself is still rubyish and it is helpping the communication between the client and the server. 

Well, one Phase done again and two maybe three more to go. Friday marked the day when my phase 1 was completed. This week we had many things to worry about. Starting on Monday we were being reminded that we were going to be assessed through out the week and would be informed if we should move on to phase 2 or maybe stay or even leave the program. I did not get asked to leave. I did though have my assessment and somehow messed it up a bit. To the point where my assessor was on the fence of whether I should move on or not. This really hit me, because I did not feel that I needed to repeat the phase 1 again.

I was not upset about potentially repeating but the fact that what I was tested on, I was sure I was good. After the assessment and my news I went to my station and talked to my partner and we discussed my assessment.  She was surprised about my news and tried to encourage me and try to uplift my emotions. But I could not listen to her so I decided to open a blank text file and try to complete my assesment again. This time I complete everything I did not complete and made the code work. I was not that far off and it only took me five minutes. This really made me question the suggestion I had just received from my assessor. So I decided to ask around and find out what others had been tested on. I discovered that about 40 percent of the people I talked to did not even get as far as I did and yet they were passed. Now you might think, "Woah Ivan i think there is a discrepancy with the testing" and I reply to that, there is not.

Don't worry I will try to explain my reasoning. The reason they did not get as far as I did is because I think that they discussed their train of thought with their assessors vs me, which I would just try to make sure I understood the request and I would try to do it as fast as I could. In this sense I did not do as much as I could have. Coding is one thing but explaining your reasoning and process is another. I could have probably had a different assessment outcome if only I had been more vocal about my thinking process. I think this put into perspective what I really need to work on. I understand syntax and Objects. I understand the basics of SQL but that means nothing if I do not explain what I am doing to the person assessing me. I truly believe that my assessor did the right job at pushing me because he did not really want to see me code but to explain what I was working on and why I was doing what I was doing.  To take ownership of what I did and why I did it.

After all this my day went as normal, still no decision made but I continued working on my second worry. Four of us were working on an app that could be used by the end of the week. I have to say that it was not easy. My group and I decided to make a ruby gem that would scrape images from search engines and would return a link to the original image so it could be used as templates during a website development. Mostly everything went smooth but we hit a snag with the scraping because we ran into two issues. The first was that our first search engine, google, encrypts their image links. The second was that even when we found ways around that we were still not getting the original image but a small image. 

By the end of the day we were all tired. One of my partners sent a good potential link but it still did not return the original image. I worked on the code and tried to get it to grab the correct tag, but that proved to be very frustrating and difficult. Then later at night we got an email from our third teammate who found a way to to grab the correct link and grab the original image from the search engine we used. Everything after this would now flow smoothly I thought. 

I was not entirely correct. While my fourth partner and I were finishing our rpecs, we found out that our other two teammates were having issues . Their personalities were clashing a bit. They both had different ideas about the scope of the project. At this point I just wanted to keep the project scope as small as possible before adding features to the project, but they had different ideas and worries. One was worrying about a feature we were not adding yet and the other was wondering how a feature would work. Long story short, there were a couple of times were I felt like the bad guy and had to remind the team that we should not move on until we complete certain goals and scopes. Little steps at a time. Finally we were complete and our app was working. We presented our project and had fun with it. I wish I would have decided to step up and guide the presentation because we missed a few things and we had technical issues that could have been avoided. Overall I was satisfied with the experience and the result and my team did a great job working together despite some minor differences. 

Another thing that came great about this was that I was able to show off my pieces of code and also explain the entire code to some of the instructors making me feel very confident because everyone understood what we did and why we did it. This is what made me finally come to a conclusion about my decision. I would be moving on to phase 2. I do know my stuff and I understand it, I just need to be more vocal about what is going through my mind and not be afraid of taking charge. 

I also learned how to manage a team and what to do to get people to focus on the project and work together. One thing is to set the main goal small and clear. Get your foundation ready and then build on top of that. This makes people confident and happy and it is also easy to manage. 

So my initial thought about Engineering Empathy is that I did not like it or felt like it was useful to me. Definitely good for others but not me. But this week it was very interesting. We talked about some of the -isms that we might experience in life and in the work force. I have discussed this in my psychology classes before, but never really gone in depth as to try and understand what is happening. One of the things that they mentioned that really got me was the idea of being neutral is almost worse that choosing a side. I wish I remembered the quote exactly because it was a great quote. Basically this quote applied in this scenario was used to say that sometimes people try to be indifferent about injustices they see but in reality you are worse than the person who is either doing the damage or the person trying to help because you are not doing anything.  

I can see this being relevant because a lot of times we see things but we assume that is might not be a big deal and just ignore it. Even though it might be affecting a person or group or even allowing someone to carry on with the bad behavior people choose to ignore the situation and nothing changes. The cycles get repeated and people get hurt.

One of the examples that was mentioned was about these guys ranking upcoming female cohorts and how this was not right. When this was said most people seemed to react in appall but then the question was posed how many would have said anything? Then no one responded which is to be expected. A lot of times we see behaviors that are not right but we do nothing. We expect that either someone else will do something or that it will pass without any effect. This is a terrible thing because we are people are not doing anything to educate others about what is not right and what is unfair. I cannot say or promise that I would always speak up when I see something wrong but I would like to believe that from now on I will try my best to speak up in scenarios were someone or some party is being treated unfairly.

Another thing that was very cool was during one exercise we did where we all gathered in a circle and would take a step in anytime some phrase such as "I have been bullied" or "I have benefited from being a group majority". What really impressed me was seeing all the people who would walk in and those who would stay out. Over all the exercise was very diverse but it was interesting to see connections being made between people who had either had an experience or not and how sometimes it is not those you expect.  

Well I am starting to ramble so I will cut this short, but I will leave saying this, This was a good session and if more EEs are like this then I can stand more behind the idea.

So I know I have been slacking with these post but man it has been a busy week. The week itself started a lot slower than last week. We did a lot of reading and practiced on some basic challenges. Some were a bit too easy if you ask me but nevertheless it was good to practice on ruby objects. The week started to pick up on around Wednesday. We did some more advance object oriented ruby. Some I struggled with a but over all i was able to over come it.

I did learn of a cool new think in ruby which is called a module. Modules are basically classes that can be accessed in any class that needs it. It is great because instead of inheritance you can just create a module that will perform certain actions when needed. One of my mates basically described it as a toolbox that can be used anywhere when needed.

If you are interested on how to implement it you can check these links below:

http://ruby-doc.org/core-2.1.0/Module.html

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/15097929/ruby-module-require-and-include

Definitely something to play around with.  

The next few days we moved on apparently ahead of schedule and we started learning and practicing more about databases. This is my favorite part of the week. So before the bootcamp I had only barely touched a data base with MS access. It does a good job at creating the databases and the tables but I had never implemented one.

By Friday I was using databases for almost anything. We had to work on a group project and my focus was on building an app that would store info in a Database. The project was completed and I did a great job with my partners. The app works but we still need to clean it but overall I am very satisfied.

Overall the week started slow but it picked up and ended up being a very exciting end to the week. Especially when the program we built works great.

Well my first week is officially done. I made it through. my one word description of the week is: "HolyShit!!". Yes I just made two words one. It was a very intense week though. I pretty much coded all day, slept and then repeated the same thing again. 

I have to say this too, I was able to save a lot of money not eating out every day. Although I did buy Pork Buns from a little Chinese bakery down the block but it was worth it. 

Even though I did not finish all the exercises I was able to learn quite a bit. One concept I learned is "Do not rush into a code!" Instead think about what you want you code to do. Maybe use the Noun/verb table which basically helps create a skeleton of the code you want. Nouns usually be classes you want and verbs are the methods inside the classes. Be open to changing your code and most importantly Test, test test. Make one small change, Test; make another, test, another change now what? You got it, test!. 

Aside from what I have above there were more stuff I learned but if I posted them, I would be here all weekend. 

Today I decided to take it really really Easy. I read a book (about Ruby) and napped. It was not too bad of a day but I figured I do not want to wear myself out before the next week begins.

As mentioned I will be explaining how some of the methods and algorithms that I work with through out the week work. I think this would be a great opportunity for me and you to learn and understand what it does. 

Basically what this code is going to do is as follows. 

array = [ 1, 3, 2 , 9, 5]    This is a basic array for simplicity. 

What the merge method will do is: 

First take the array and split it becoming [1, 3, 2] and [9, 5]

Then it will go and call itself until the array looks like [1], [3], [2], [9], [5]

Once it gets to this point it will then combine two at a time. This will occur in another method. The way it combines it is by comparing the first element in the array to see which one is the smallest. Then the smallest will become the first element in the third array. This occurs until both arrays are empty and the new array is organized. Remember that there is a lot of recursion so new arrays will be later combined. 

The following is a representation of what is happening

[1] < [3]  [2] < [9]   [5]

[1, 3]   [2, 9]    [5]

[1,3]  [2, 5, 9]

[1, 2, 3, 5, 9] When we reach this point then the new sorted array is returned.  

Since my last update I have finally had two days at bootcamp. These two days did not feel like two days, rather they felt like 2 weeks. Although the first half of the first day was introduction and meetings, we were thrown into some coding right away. 

My challenges for this week have not necessarily been code related but interpersonal. I have found that it is really hard for me to code with people. Mostly because I tend to shut myself down when I start comparing myself to others, which links to my biggest second challenge, MYSELF! I have been comparing myself to others constantly. Whether that is performance or knowledge I cannot help it.

I am aware that I am doing it but I cannot yet figure out how to turn it off. We have been told to avoid doing that because the main thing in the program is to actually understand that concepts rather than complete the most challenges. I have found some cohort with whom I am able to interact and made me feel comfortable, so for now my tactic is to interact with them when I feel insecure and perhaps take some personal time before going back to coding with the partner. For now this seems to suppress my feelings but not cure it. It is only the first week so I try to tell myself that and try to stay positive, but i won't lie, It is hard. 

Yesterday we discussed a few cool stuff. The first was talking about the super ego. This is a concept I have not discussed since college, five years ago. I had forgotten how detrimental it is to let it control it. I thought it was very interesting up until we did the last exercise in which we had to manifest our SuperEgo. This was not great! All of my insecurities felt like they grew exponentially. I was getting so insecure that I started to speak lower and censored myself to the point that I even tried to make up new stuff to manifest. That did not work because then my super ego would call me out on it so in the end I just started to fill the silence with noises. I could tell I was not the only one feeling that way. My partner definitely had an impact as well. It was interesting to see the emotions around the room but then at the same time my super ego just started to mock me for not expressing myself or react the same way others were. This then made me feel worse.

In the end what I took from this is that everyone has something holding them back. A little voice that is the darker self, who can recollect everything from your past and is only there to judge you or to plant self doubt. I think this was a great awareness exercise but at the same time I wish they had mentioned how to cope with these emotions. I do not know if this is something we will be learning later or if I should just schedule something with the counselor and maybe discuss this. Something I want to do is read the book that Karim suggested reading and maybe learning more about the subject. I just don't know when I will be having any reading time. 

So far I have been arriving to the boot between 7:30 and 8:30 in the morning and leaving at 10 or 10:30. it definitely does not compare to phase 0 at all. I feel lost and a sense of insecurity. I have just been staying behind learning some of the new concepts and making sure I can understand them. I can't say that I have done that though. Last night I was able to play with some algorithms that would sort and array. I understood some of the concepts but if someone asked me to code any of them I don't think I could complete them. Make I could do one of them but that is the one that turned out to be the slowest because it's performance delay increases exponentially. An array of 1000 elements might take 2 min but then double that and now it is 4 mins and so on. The examples we worked on yesterday were the ones that had hundreds of thousands. 

To wrap things up, I have to say that the experience has been overwhelming and in a way disheartening. Mostly because of me and my insecurities but on the bright side, I know what is going on with me and it's cause, I just need to figure out how to cope with this.