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.

Ajax Everything

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 :

• ok : true or false, tells the javascript if the operation succeeded or not
• path : The address of the next page
• alert : The eventual problems or info messages.

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.

Pressure

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.

D-6

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!

An end before a new beginning

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!