Group Project

The big even of yesterday was: The final projects pitching.

Almost everybody pitched. You had good projects, strange projects, fun projects, good things!

The one I pitched was about Role Playing Games. The idea is that I really enjoy pen and paper role playing games, but I also can’t play them most of the time. My friends are all around the world, and I don’t spend my time with my character sheets, dice, and/or books in my pocket.

So to counter that, I wanted to make an app that makes the link between players and game masters, and give you these commands that will give you all the infos you have in these books, all the character sheets, and the dice rolling, just by sending a mail with different commands.

In the end, I was not picked as one of the projects we would work on, but then among the 5 projects, 3 were projects that I really want to work on!

So in the end, I am in Armando’s team, and we are about to make a great app for diabetics to track their blood sugar stats and format them decently to transmit them to a doctor. I find it awesome and in a way, I am glad I was not picked!

More pressure

I put a lot of pressure on myself. Most of the time, I will not seem very stressed out, but inside, I may just be completely freaking out.

The idea is that I overthink everything. Being logical enough, I overthink without putting too much emotions and feeling in these thoughts. I see something, try to find all the outcomes (I will never succeed, but well…), try to think about the causes and consequences, study everybody’s point of view…

In the end, I like to think that it makes me calm and not stress out much on the outside.

Lately, the fact that I am coming to a situation that had a bad outcome the last time(the same situation I came to when I came back from korea), made me think about a lot of things, basically ways to prevent myself from falling in the same trap again. That just made me sleep less… which actually made me think more… And I fell into this strange loop that ended with me being exhausted, and giving too much credit to emotions and feelings.

Sleep depravation

The lack of sleep I am talking about is mainly due to a non restful sleep. A sleep where you keep on waking up, thinking about bad things, etc…

This lack of sleep makes you take bad paths, the wrong paths, basically. In the end, I am now sleep depraved, and even though I worked on that pressure, and talking about it was enough to relieve a lot of pain on that topic, sleeping 6h does not make you really rested, especially if you’ve been running on 5s for weeks…

But then, I am a logical person. I am also a person who does fall deep into these pressure cycles, but overcomes that. I did that before, a lot of time, and approaching things logically just ends up making me overcome whatever emotional challenge I have had so far.

So I work on my sleep, on my well being, and I am now much better than yesterday. Soon, I will be even better, and be sure that at the same time next week, our team will be kicking asses, and I will not be dragging them down!

Clean Javascript

I will never say that enough, but if you code in Javascript and don’t make it object oriented, you’re missing something.

Yesterday, I paired with Johnny on a full frontend page. The idea is that we had a rails server with built-in routes, and we had to make the whole Javascript app that did everything with these routes, all in one page

In the end, we built a huge machine, all in Javascript, pure javascript (We did use some JQuery here and there, but the rest was all in javascript). That was fun, we played a lot, and we still finished what was expected of us for the whole day at 3PM.

In the end, we both learned a lot, had a lot of fun, and made a huge thing.

And the Javascript was… CLEAN! Object oriented, module pattern, fun stuff! No soup, no 100+ lines scripts…

Final Project

Tomorrow is the pitching day. I can feel the pressure, even though I do love it.

The idea is that we pitch an idea to the whole bootcamp. Then, people from our cohort vote for projects, and the teachers select 4 or 5 and we have to work on that until the very day.
The person who pitched the project will lead his/her 4-5 people group through that.

I am expecting a lot from that. I always loved to lead group (If you asked me when I was a kid I would have said that when I grow up, I want to be … a boss. The guy who make it so that things actually work, and that the whole team make it happen). Now, tomorrow is my chance to do that WITH code.

Plus, I have that strange feeling that tells me I don’t have to show people some code, I have to IMPRESS people. Working on that group project, on one of my ideas, leading a group the right way, and coding my way through that, I think I can make that happen.

I will tell you more about it when that is over but… I feel like things are going to get crazy pretty fast… I can’t wait!

Leadership

Leadership is something I like. It is something I always liked. Apparently, lastly, people like my leadership too, which gives me more opportunity to train that!

In the end, I always worked on that, always loved that, and not because I am a power hungry bearded dude, but because I want things to go well. When I am in a team, I love to be able to guide any part of the project in the right direction, to ensure a great realization. But then, there are things you can’t change. Most of the time, you can’t change the leader for instance. And if things are not working correctly, I would say it is his/her responsibility! So to fight that, I always wanted to lead, and be able to change whatever needed to be changed, even myself.

Today, I had a fun conversation with David of Phase 1 and Stephen. The topic was : Games and Leadership.

I loved to have feedback on the feeling I give to people around, to hear about the ideas David and Stephen had, and to share everybody’s experience.

These people are just … AWESOME!

I will tell you more about it whenever I can but for now… It’s time to sleep for a good pitching day!

JQuery

Yesterday, I paired with Ivan. I like the fact that even if he had not been fully recommended for phase 2, he kicks ass in phase 3!

We build a new version of JQuery, just to make sure we understood things, we got in the mind of libraries makers, and we broke the idea of “this is magic” that everybody has. The idea is to not be a consumer of music, but more of an audiophile, or even a sound engineer if that is what we are looking for (Said by Steven).

And so we worked on that, made the whole part of the library we had to, with clean and tricky javascript.

In the end, I had a very good coding day. At 6, we had finished the program, understood what we had to take from it, and had a clean refactored code. All in all, I can say we rocked ;)

Superego

Yesterday was also the new day where phase 1 learn about their superego. Just like every time a phase get in one, we get to witness that change in some mentalities, that feeling that make people talk more, share more of their experiences, knowing that things happened the same way for all of us.

In the end, some, mostly outspoken people, reacted with the experience being easy on them. When you don’t hesitate in sharing and talking, sharing about your superego should not affect you that much, right?

Some others were more affected and ended up sharing more (Go David!).

Most of them though had already one week before that hard session. So in the end, it was “less” heavy on them.

But since that made people share a bit more, I love it ^.^

Cookies

I have a tremendous amount of cookies in my locker.

Coming here, I started eating a lot of cookies. I went to good bakeries, found ways to get more, etc.. to the point that nowadays, I am called “Cookie Monster”.

A few days ago, I went and get some at Subway. When it’s 10€ for 12 in your country, but 5$ for 12 here… you don’t hesitate much, do you?
But then I also got some cookies from “Batter”, a very good bakery down the street apparently.

So in my locker I have close to 30 huge cookies just waiting for me.

Then, a funny thing happened. 2 days ago, I paired with Chris. We finished in a decent amount of time, and while he was “expected” to get home around 10PM, he actually came home around 7.

So his girlfriend ended up saying: “How come?”
And the answer she got was apparently : “Quentin”…

After that, she just suggested she would bake cookies to thank me…

So… I am getting more cookies! Thuy is gonna be so proud ;)

Making pages fast

Yesterday, we had a fun day about optimisation. The idea is that we had pages that were loading in 20 seconds or more, and we had to find ways to fasten them.

What we got from that is, among others :

• Use SQL requests to order, group, etc… It is MUCH faster than getting everything from the database and sorting it in ruby or JS
• JS allows you to act as if you loaded everything even if you did not, USE THAT. Play with ajax, load only the titles, and when somebody clicks on a button, you load the rest!

At the end, all the pages were loading under 200 ms. Next part is destroying these pages to make useful ones instead haha.

Group projects

We just finished the weekend group project with Armando, Hunter, Chermaine, and Matthew. It was really a bread group, a great dynamic. We were very laid back, no stress or anything. We did finish what we wanted and even more, everything works, and we had clear, maintainable, and tested code.

Now with that being said, we have the final group projects coming on Thursday. People have been talking about it fo a bit now, sharing ideas that people are gonna pitch, checking them out…

I know I have a few ideas on my own, and I am interested in pitching them and then leading a group with that. I will not talk about them now, especially since they’re not that clear in my mind even now, but don’t worry… It’s coming ;)

Teaching

Yesterday, I ate with fiery skippers. I find it really amazing that people are so different from the cohorts we could see so far. They are a huge group of very knowledge hungry people.

During the weekend, I also spent a lot of time with them, trying to push them in the right direction to solve Sudoku, the challenge people complete in the first week.

I also spent a bit of time with phase 2 Golden Bears, trying to share what I know.

And yesterday, I spent an hour with Armando showing him a way to complete some Javascript exercise without feeling lost about being in a language he is not used to. In the end, I just showed him how to solve the problem in Ruby, a language he feels more comfortable in, and how to translate it to Javascript.

I loved teaching in Korea, and before that. I like to share my knowledge (which, if you follow the famous french saying, means that I have very little knowledge myself). And now I see that even here, I love doing that.

I love trying to explain things to people actually listening, and using what you are showing them.

I think that after DBC, I will try to be a coach. I think I can be a decent help, and have a lot of fun doing it!

Anyway, that is for in 2 weeks, which in DBC time means something like 2 or 3 months ^.^

So, yesterday was a nice day. I wish I had a lot to say about it, but the idea is that I rested, I pair with the awesome Matthew, I ate well, I finished what I wanted, no pressure, nice weather, everything.

It’s sad that I don’t have much to say about it, but that’s cool ^.^

See you guys on monday!

Todos

So, in DBC, we made Todos. When I say that, I mean, we learned how to make a todo app jn Ruby, with the command line. Then we learned how to make a new one that saves and read things in a file. After that we got in phase 2 and made a simple Sinatra Todo app. Then we made one that used Javascript, and now we’re 4 days into phase 3, and we already made 2 todo apps.

I feel like there is a common theme somewhere… Are DBC teachers trying to tell us something?

I do not tend to use todo apps myself nowadays but I now know how to make it however I want. I also know how to manage my time, or… know how to not manage my time actually.

As for code, I know that using that same theme to learn new things help a lot, and I feel like I can learn what I want to learn by simply making a todo with it and comparing with what I know.

And since I intend to learn much more… I end up with many todos apps eon my todo list…

Group Project

We got a small group project again, in Rails. Things are much easier, Rails does everything, people are confident, and we can now play with these interesting things, at our own pace, without stressing out!

This week we have to make a “Stack Overflow”-like app. Basically, answer questions, select the best answer, and comment questions or answers. Also, they can vote for a question or an answer, and the site makes the selection after that.

I am not even sure what to say about that, but it is what we’re doing.

We’re having fun, and have an awesome group again, I guess I’ll have something to show on monday, but even if I don’t… No biggie!

Effects of DBC

Yesterday, I did something that triggered Matthew. Basically, without getting too deep into that, I made him feel like he was left out for a moment, search for a reason why I would do so, and end up on some pretty bad, sad, and mean reasons.

But then, magic happened.

When I came back to work with him, before we started, we had a conversation that kinda went like this :

“Before we start, do you mind if we talk for a second?
– Yeah sure, no problem, what’s up?”

And then, he ended up sharing what exactly happened, what he felt, what he saw, and what he feels now. I shared how I felt about it, explained and confirmed what he saw, and apologized. And that was an argument that was solved in less than 2 minutes, without any fight or hard feeling.

This is what DBC made. DBC made us understanding human beings. DBC made Matthew not freak out about what happened, try to check what was happening, and then reflect. DBC made me listen, put myself in his shoes and be understanding.

I had an experience like that with my fiancee, and it is quite strange to realize that what you have been learning, no matter how true it was in your current environment, is actually true outside of it.

The first time I started listening like we try to do it here, it actually worked flawlessly. I tried again, it worked again. It may not work 100% of the time, but I know that I will keep on doing that for a while!

Test driven development

After a few days of testing, we started the test driven development on Rails.

The idea of test driven development is to make tests before you type any code. Let me give you a small example :

• Situation : I want to give a user the possibility to create an account

• I write tests, from the biggest to the smallest:

  • Test 1 : Fake an user that clicks user creation, then fill in the fields with correct info and click on the create button. The user should be taken back to the first page, and now he can login with these infos. (Integration tests)
  • Test 2 : Fake a request on the creation page, it should be defined and give a form.(controller test)
  • Test 3 : Fake a request on the route it takes after you click on the “Create” button. It should add a new User to the Database (Controller test)
  • Test 4 : The DB should not accept info that is not correct, so you test if it adds something when you try and push random invalid info to the DB (Model Unit Test)

• Now I have that behavior, that I specified more and more, while writing the tests. Now, I can make the tests pass one by one. I start with Test 4, make these limits, then 3, 2, and finally 1.

W00t? You have code that does exactly what you want, and that does not break! If you want to add code later, you just have to run the tests once this is finished, and make everything pass according to plan.

It tends to take a bit longer, but then you have a “perfect code!”. So do that!

The new guys

I spent a bit of time with the new cohort. They are awesome!

It is amazing to see that the tribe spirit is actually very different, once again. We had the “University students” Sea Lions, the “Overachieving Kids” Banana slugs, the “Shy kids” Golden bears, and now I think we have the “Against-all-odds team” fiery skippers.

Many of them don’t come from computer science backgrounds, many are not the usual start-up 20-something american bearded dudes. But then, I am really impressed with the effort, and especially the team spirit they have. If one knows, one shares. Pairing is optional today? I heard : You can make bigger groups.

That is something I really resonate to, I just love it. They ask questions, try to know, show, learn, share, every verb I love ;)

I think I’m gonna hang around a lot even after graduation, because I think these skippers are going to impress me big time!

And Golden bears are good too, but I just think that individuality and shyness makes it harder. I am expecting good things to come out of the final group projects of the Bears, but I feel like they will struggle more than the skippers.

My first full project

So, I finished my project. You can see it live on : Heroku, and the code on Github. You can also check some of my tests on Jasmine.

It shows you a list of movies that have been shot in San Francisco. You try typing a movie title, and it autocompletes the movie title. It then geocodes every location where it has been shot, from the address that I am given by Sfdata, and pins them on the map.

Then, I make small popups info windows for when you click on the pin, with the director, location, name, year, and a link to IMDB to find the movie.

It is not that impressive, but I f*cking did it! I took 2 days (Plus 2 slacking with only one commit… oops), and I learned about things I did not know about :

• Flask
• Jasmine + Sinon
• Backbone
• Google Maps API
• Google Geocoding

And now I feel good about it!

Testing

Yesterday we tested. We tested Rails for the first time, and it was not that hard. Many things are built-in, and the presence of gems like : shoulda-matchers ended up making that day even easier than expected.

The idea behind testing your code is that you don’t want it to break later. Now that you are working on that 100 lines project, you don’t feel the need to do so, but what about when it hits 10000 lines and the 10001 actually breaks something in the middle? And what if solving that bug actually creates new ones?

So, to prevent that… We test. We test that an user can create an account, that it is correctly saved. We test that an user can login, that our password verification does not send unencrypted passwords, that the posts we make are not duplicates, etc…

All that, in 3 big groups :

• Integration tests : Complicated to do (Use Capybara for Ruby web frameworks like Sinatra or Rails), and very long to execute. The idea is that you make a program do exactly what an user would do, to make sure every step works
• Controller tests : This is a bit … fuzzy. These are considered as integration tests, or unit tests, depending on the piece of code you’re testing, but of specific actions of the “controller” in your app. For example, when a user sends data to /users/new it should create a new user. They are faster than integration test, but still not the fastest
• Model (Unit) tests : The idea here is to test the basic data you have. You have one single piece of data, a User, a Post, a Category, and you want to test that its data is the one you want. You want to test that a User can’t have an email without an @ for example.

This, we did it in Ruby, with Rspec, Capybara, shoulda-matchers, and some others. I then did that in Javascript with Jasmine and Sinon, for a small part of the evening. All in all, it was a nice day, and now nothing breaks anymore ;)

A video

A tradition here in Dev Bootcamp says that people who are graduating from phase 2 need to prepare a video for the newcomers of the next monday. The video shows a bit about the bootcamp, the spirit, and the people that you can meet there… So without further introduction, ours :

Naps

Nowadays, I am a bit tired. I had no idea that we had to change the clocks on sunday, and discovered that after a very short night… Unfortunately, I was busy so I ended up doing a lot of things and not sleeping enough.

I am working on that, but since Monday, I am napping every afternoon now!
I hope I can make that be less of a habit soon… So I’ll go to sleep now ;)

Phase 3

So, first, sorry for not giving any news for friday. If I had to sum friday up, it would probably go like : “Partayyyyyyyyyyy”.
Phase 3 was graduating and showing us projects they worked on. Phase 1 and 2 were moving on to the next phase, so everybody just … had fun… and a lot of alcohol. If I can find the links to the projects I’ll let you know, but in short we had :

• A social app for street performers to share their videos and people to tip them,
• An app that tracks your bad (but legal) substance abuse (coffee, alcohol, cigarette)
• An app that helps you keep track of all the online courses you can take and all the ones you take.
• An app that helps independent music teacher track everything about their business

Yesterday we started phase 3 and we started working on Rails… Basically, if I had to say anything about it, I would say : Take everything we did so far, and now stop doing it because everything is generated automatically in rails!

We’ll have fun, and play with a few things for 8 days, then group projects. That sounds awesome and I can’t wait ;)

Projects

So, group projects are approaching… I have ideas, and my #1 would be to join Chermaine and work on the project we thought about together. But then, I also want to pitch a lot of ideas so I guess I’ll try and share the ideas and see how it goes! Not right now, but I will, I promise!

Then, on the weekend, I learned 4 things :
– How to use Flask (A Python equivalent of Sinatra) – How to compress WebAssets (And not have 10000000 js files here and there, even though your code is full of clear small classes for example…) – How to play with Backbone (A Javascript framework to make whole apps on the front-end) – How to play with Google Maps (Put a map of the site and pin stuff to it, geocode stuff, etc…)

And with that, I ended up making an app. It is an app that shows you all the movie shooting locations in San Francisco, by movie. It is not perfect or finished (I expect it to be finished tonight) but so far you can see :
– The site : http://movie-shootings-in-sf.herokuapp.com/ – The code : https://github.com/Qt-dev/shootings

Again, I’ll tell you when it’s over, but you can check it out for now!

Another first day in DBC

Yesterday, the new cohort started. It feels so strange to be in the seniors…

They seem pretty interesting and interested. I think they have a very different dynamic than the Golden bears, and again, very different than the Banana Slugs too. I can’t wait until I get to know them and learn more about them!

No worries though, I still love the golden bears, and more than that, I love the banana bears!

Now, time to go back to eating cookies and coding. See you tomorrow!

Rest

When I say rest, I don’t mean sleeping all day… Yesterday, we had to finish some challenges that we had been given a few days before, had a couple of lectures, and then I worked on personal projects here and there. This is what I call rest.

In the end, that was a fruitful day, and a happy one too! I spoke with some people I had never met in the bootcamp, got some info on after-DBC, I learned stuff about languages and frameworks I did not know… AND, I congratulated my mother for her very happy birthday ;)

Personal projects

You can check my github for that. I have a few projects I had been dying to work on, and having some time to do so may make me finish a lot of them really fast!

I won’t tell you all about them yet, but I can tell you I expect to have a lot of stuff to do and to use them as a way to show the world my progress!

In the end, these are the things that make you look different, and make the people want to hear about you, and why not even hire you!

DBC Life

RAO HAS NO BEARD ANYMORE!

Apart from that, DBC life is fun. It was a slow day, fun things, but then the results of the assessments also kicked in, people dealt with that, and that was a big day for everybody.

And in the end, if I had to keep one sentence from yesterday, I would say : If you have a lesson to get from DBC, it should be ‘You don’t know anything, but that’s ok’.

No matter how much we learn here, when we get out, we’re gonna be asked about what we don’t. And we are not going to be asked to know stuff, but to show we can learn, and we don’t freak out when we don’t know.

So the lesson would be : Stop stressing out, and learn how to google ;)