I’ve got a coding challenge a few weeks ago about how to make a navbar out of pure JS/CSS, no library. I won’t spoil it, especially for the next people doing it, but I thought the idea interesting so I decided to show how one could do one in ReactJS.
So, this is a guide about how to make a simple dropdown navbar from some backend data and simple React/CSS.
To understand you’ll need :
This is a small and easy guide about something you can do easily with React and CSS3.
First, a few things you need to know about before we start :
I am writing this in the plane from San Francisco to Paris (actually Newark to Paris but who cares about layovers).
I am leaving for a bit, but I will be back. I usually make my posts in ¾ parts, to talk about specific topics, but today, this is a letter to the people I met in SF.
Today is a small check-in day. Time to share my thoughts a bit
So, this weekend was the “NASA SpaceApp hackathon”, and we won the first round. But I see you coming with your questions, so let me attempt to explain?.
Hey everybody, I am back!
I’m sorry for not giving news, the end of DBC program was … strange. You spend 9 weeks averaging on 85 hours a week in Dev Bootcamp, coding, and when it stops and the building is closed (we moved that same weekend), your life feels… empty.
So on the next day, for the weekend, I slept, ate, and slept again. Then I coded a bit, refactored some old things, cleaned readmes and tests, and that was it. I think I can safely say that it was at least in the top 5 of my most unproductive weekends ever. But then, maybe it’s just the contrast with the 9 others before that…
After that, on that tuesday evening, Thuy arrived, with her sister and her sister’s boyfriend. I could spend hours, or even days describing the next week, but let me try to sum it up :
We walked all around San Francisco, did a lot of touristy things in the city, biked on the golden gate bridge, went to Oakland Murmur, and a thousand times to the piers. All in all, it was a hard week (13 miles walks everyday…) but a very fun and interesting one. I discovered the city and feel much better about it now, I spent all of my time with my wonderful fiancee, I showed her everything she wanted to see, and some things that I wanted to show her, showed her DBC and the people… Perfect!
Plus, I now have a crazy tan, like I spent the week in Hawaii haha.
Now I’m back to job hunting. Once you get out, your next target is a corresponding job!
I’m looking for a company that would allow me to learn and show the world what I can do, like I keep on saying in that blog. Discovering is my thing, and writing meaningful code is its little brother!
My plan right now is to join as many meetups as I can to be able to show what I can do, to work on interesting personal projects that can help in that goal too, and try and contact the people I can find who can help me with that.
I would rather stay in SF, or in the US, but I moved, and I’ll move if need be!
In case you are interested or know somebody who could be, here is
I now HAVE to code, it’s in my blood! ;)
So, I took that need for proof of my skills for a good enough excuse to go back on the projects I had not had time for before.
So I started working on:
If you have ideas about projects I could join, just send a mail to quentin@devauchelle.eu, I’ll be happy to work on them!
So, yesterday, I graduated. I now have my very own dog tags with my name on it. I am “officially” a web developer. I will try to not spoil it too much for the people still in the program, but I do have to talk about this day.
If I had to sum that day up in one word, I’ld say : ‘Tears’.
The day started with the usual friday group checkins. What came out of that were that other cohorts were excited for everything new (every cohort is getting to the next phase on monday, DBC is moving, a new cohort is coming too…), and unhappy about us moving out. But then, like we told them again and again, we are not going anywhere.
After that, we presented our projects. A lot of clapping, a lot of laughing, and being impressed by every one of them. Also, for some reason, Rao discovered that I existed that very day, apparently. He asked me what was that necklace that I am wearing… But then I have been wearing that every single day for 3 years now… But that’s fine, I still love him !
Then, we came back to coding… psych, we did not write a single line that day. We ate these things DBC had ordered for us (COOKIES!), and then I took a huge nap.
I got waken up when Steven, one of our teachers, was about to speak about a nice life lesson he got some time ago. I won’t tell you the whole story but I will just sum it up with :
The day you start resenting everything about where you are, what you do, what you life looks like… Take a step back. Cash in on some money you have, and get out. Physically, mentally, it does not matter, just get out. I think this is a great advice that sometimes people just don’t follow. I got stuck in France and ended up needing friends and family to pull me out because I had not plan any kind of exit strategy… Don’t be me!
After that, we went to the park, and without telling you much about it, let’s just say we had the chance to say what we thought about people. And I just wanted to say, from the bottom of my heart, that I hate you, banana slugs, so much for the amount of tears you made me cry! ;)
Let me give you a quick example of things I heard :
There were plenty of others, these are just the 3 ones that came to my mind right now, you probably get the tone anyway.
After that, we went back, and graduated. We were welcomed with that High-Five tunnel that greeted us the very first day, then they gave us our dog tags,… and we partied until 2 in the morning!
I spent almost all of my night trying to tell people how much I love them and how grateful I am that I met them. These 9 weeks were such an adventure…
Now, I am out, but what I feel is that the training ended, now it’s time for the big game. I am never leaving these people, I will haunt them forever, at least just to thank them for how good they made me feel.
And if I end up making them happy one day in their lives, I will consider myself happy. And to all the DBC Staff, all the alumnus, all the current students, my cohort and the others, I am talking about all of you. You are SO going to regret making me feel that good ;)
Tomorrow is the big day. I am writing this in advance to make sure I have time to do it before tomorrow ends, because I know that it is going to be crazy.
Tomorrow is my last day as a boot in Dev Bootcamp. After our usual friday group check-ins, our team will present our final project, then talk about the next week and job searching, and spend the rest of the day pretty much partying…
So, today, to prepare, we worked on the presentation. I was hesitating, wondering if I could speak about refactoring (I did a bit of that… I had a 5 hours streak on it, with 28 commits in the pull request at the end…), but I don’t think it is as interesting as the other things to talk about. At some points, we have to make choices, right?
I will be talking about the javascript part of that app. Basically, since I worked a lot on the connection between pages in javascript, I will be explaining how I built the whole engine. Also, I will try to push the fact that everything is done with very simple methods, clear and readable (still available on github).
When you work with a team on a very tight schedule (= all the time) you have to have concise code. You will never go back and edit/refactor the part you did not have time to write correctly today, and if you think otherwise, you are wrong!
I always had the feeling that people don’t get the praises they deserve.
Everywhere you go, no matter what you do, people will see the bad sides. If they see the good parts, then they will just not give it enough importance to praise as much as they would complain if they were bad…
When I got accepted for DBC, I thought I needed to work on it, in my own tiny world. After all, one of the idioms I try and follow is “Be the change you want to see in the world” – Gandhi.
So, back in France, I ended up finding old teacher that taught me how to do some things that people called useless, just to tell them how useful they were to me. I went to talk to everybody about what they were doing good…
I like to think that if I am in a very good place, I have the power to have a word that matters to most. If I don’t use it, I am doing something wrong.
So today, I went to Steven, one of our teachers, to tell him about how inspiring he is to me. My words were, more or less : “Before I came here, I ended up doubting myself, thinking that I was taking the wrong path, that I should not be all that ‘crazy’ and start getting into the norm. But coming here, I realized a lot of people are like me. And I feel like he tends to be crazy a bit like I could be, and thanks to that, no matter where I go after that, I will forever know that there are people just like me, in a place somewhere, that they are doing great, and inspiring billions of people. So thank you.”
I then ended up speaking with Shereef, the creator of Dev Bootcamp, and having more or less the same words. Also, I had a meeting with Sefora, a DBC staff member that works for the mental well being of the boots, and was very grateful that I met her. I am looking forward to having more conversations with all of these awesome people… I have so much to learn!
Today was the day we talk and meet people. In that same idea, I found out that I may end up introducing Thuy to new people everyday of her stay in here.
Teachers and DBC staff are on the list, alumni too, and then even current boots!
I know that there are some nice places and events that happen usually the first week of the month in SF apparently (I just discovered that), and so I will probably end up in all these things, with all these people.
I can say without much doubt that it will be an awesome week and I can’t wait!
What an awesome name, that our captain found us! And here is the site : Glucose Amigo
So, we pretty much finished the app. This, guys, is what we can do in one week, with 4-5 of us, after 9 weeks of hard work. We came all with different experiences, behaviors, point of views, and in the end… We build a full app in one week.
I wish I would have more time to spend on the testing (I did most of the Javascript, there are 2 test, one on the login one on the logout…), but after that week of working with that awesome team, what I want to say is : Thank you DBC, thank you team, and thank you captain!
Working with all these awesome people is incredible!
If you want to know more about the app (and not read the “help” in the menu), the idea is that we made an app that keeps track of one or multiple diabetics’s blood sugar level and weight, gives you a graph and a list of records, sends it per mail to your doctor, and can remind you to measure, and log the measures.
In these 9 weeks, I saw a lot of different personalities. For example, among the people I paired with, I found 2 different types of people:
I paired with both, and … strangely enough, no conflict emerged from it! I think I am a bit more of the second, but in the days I was working with somebody from the other group, I would just work his/her way, or use my “reputation” to try and teach the other person, go over what I did not see fully before, and go deeper.
In the end, I think I got most of what I could get from DBC, and mostly, I got the one lesson everybody should take : You don’t know anything. Thinking you do is dangerous, don’t do that.
Some people may think that this is just a fancy way to say that when you actually know what you’re talking about (For real, I have already been told), but honestly, it is 100% of the truth. The difference between a confident person and and a stressed out one is quite often the fact that the confident already knows he has no idea what he’s doing, but knows how to figure things out, learn, and maybe next time not have to spend too much time on it.
Also, we had to work on a personality test for our career week at DBC. My results… : You are an ENTJ.
If I have to sum it up, I would say I am a confident and convincing leader who need people to survive and who sometimes end up relying too much on emotions. I don’t know if it is true, but I like the description, so that’s a start!
So, 5 days huh…
I learn a lot of new things around, about SF, about the city and everything around it, just to make sure I can be the perfect guide for Thuy. I have found cookies places that will blow her mind, and I think I found some great example of SF food that would make her love the place.
In the time I’ve been here, I have not had any time to discover anything, but even in that small 10 blocks area that I lived in, I still found restaurants that have nothing to do with what we have in Paris, kinds of food we never ate, and better versions of things we found elsewhere (Of course, I did not find better bread, but that is another topic…)
I could say I have not seen the sea, Alcatraz, the bridges, or many other things, but the thing that I feel like I want to discover the most is … SF food and drinks! Maybe that is her influence, who knows…
Anyway, in the end, I just want to say thank you to SF in a whole. Your food rocks so hard I became addicted and I can’t wait to get her hooked on that too ;)
First of all, I’ll start by saying I am sorry I did not write before. I have been…overwhelmed by a few things I will try to sum up in this article, and just ended up having no time anyway.
So, our app is going great! You can see its evolution on : Github. In all that, one of the biggest thing I played with on this app is the javascript. If you look in /app/assets/javascripts, you’ll see what I’m talking about.
The idea is that we ended up developing everything separately (doctors, diabetics, records, etc…) and I ended up in charge of connecting it altogether in Javascript. To do so, I play with two types of routes in the app :
1 – Routes that render JSON : Basically, I render a JSON object with 3 parameters :
2 – Routes that render partials : These render a small baby-html page with some javascript code to populate the javascript templates when it loads.
The idea is that every action and button is plugged on an action on the controller that calls a route that render JSON. If it returns ok:true, then I take the path, ask for the partial from it in javascript, and render it in the middle of the page, populating javascript templates on the go. If not, I print the alerts for 5 seconds and don’t move.
I had fun doing that and even though it needs a lot of refactoring right now, I hope you can see that and enjoy reading it as much as I did writing it.
Sometimes, you get stuck in a strange loop. I just … had that exact thing.
I put a lot of pressure on me, to make sure I can make my way out of the life I had in France. Because of that, I end up sleeping less. But then if I sleep less, I think about that more, and sleep even less… * infinite loop *.
At some point, it breaks, and so it did. I ended up completely exhausted last thursday/friday, with a lot of things on my mind. I have to impress people to make sure I can move. But then I also know that I fought my way through to Dev Bootcamp, I worked hard IN Dev Bootcamp, I WILL make it happen no matter what. But it was not that clear at that time.
I gave this analogy to the people who ended up listening :
Picture a black NBA player that comes from a bad neighborhood.
He struggled to get food when he was a kid. He struggled against racism his whole life. He fought the system in school, every step of the way.
Now, he is fighting to get in the playoff and to be the MVP of every match he plays.
Well, if today, you were to tell him to go back to struggling to get food, he would be disappointed, probably angry, but he made it once and you can be sure he’ll make it twice.
This is the kind of idea I have about going back to France. I don’t mind struggling to find a better job, to make the world a better place, to make the difference against much more intelligent people. But what I would not like would be to have to go back to struggling for minimum wages with a 2 hours commute every morning every evening, and only 6 hours of seeing my fiance every week. I fought my way through, and I would rather not get back to that.
But then if I have to… I will.
The only thing I know now, is that I am a new person, and you can be sure that I will fight as much as I can to get my fiance, my sister, and the people I loved to the comfortable places that they deserve, and the world a better place, one step at a time.
She’s coming!!!
She’s coming!!!
My fiance, Thuy, the wonderful woman that actually chose to stick with me for 6 years now (I know, people are crazy…) is coming to San Francisco! I finally have the chance to get her into that world, show her what’s happening, introduce her to the wonderful people I met…
And make her taste the great foods I found!
She still thinks that in the 7 days she get in here, she will end up getting a burger at burger king… Come on, people from here, let’s laugh about it together ;)
She will be coming on next tuesday and I don’t know how much I will be blogging at that point, but right now… It’s D-6!
Dev Bootcamp is coming to an end!
We are on our way to finish our last projects, we had fun, learned a lot, and met really cool people (looking at you, Chris! Haha). But this is now coming to an end.
However, I don’t take it as an end but more like a beginning. I am a new self. I am a new this (got this, fellow developers?). I am a new person that now has the rest of his life to profit from this extraordinary experience.
I see that as the beginning of a new life that I will start, happily, with my fiance, or wife, we’ll not stay like that for too long I hope. Not completely unlinked from the old life, but as a continuity, I see the before-graduation period as a preparatory stage for what is coming.
Now, things are different, it is a new life, and I intend to be very good at it!