I’m sitting at a desk in the middle of Dev Bootcamp surrounded by the torrent of activity. Employer day is in full swing in the Dev Bootcamp office, with dozens of employers interviewing my fellow bootcamp graduates. It’s finally hitting me that it’s over and looking back it’s hard to find a time in my [...]
Pardon the horse racing metaphor, I just finished reading Seabiscuit.It’s been a whirlwind over the past two weeks. From packing my wife up so that she could make her way to South Korea, to our introduction to Rails, I haven’t been short of projects to work on. To keep it short and too the point, [...]
Today’s curriculum was a retreat into the wilds of Ruby with Corey Haines. Corey is an experienced developer who has been using a TDD approach to software development for a LONG time. Like 8 and a half years long. The whole point of Code Retreat was to get us to take a step back from [...]
I had the priveledge of receiving a code review from Marcus Phillips yesterday and wanted to share some take-aways from the evening. Marcus’ generosity with his time (he spent almost 2 hours talking to me) still blows me away, and I hope I can reciprocate my own time to fellow developers in the future when I [...]
Guess what? My team just published our first app today, all by ourselves! We were sick of dealing with command line UI’s and the nastiness that they produce and opted to try to learn Sinatra over the past day. What was the goal? Produce an app that can tell you whether you should use Public [...]
Expect the unexpected. That is what I have come to expect over the past 5 weeks. Today was no exception. After working for the past two days on a Ruby method parser, I was summarily “fired” from my existing team and moved to a team that is working on developing an App that allows a [...]
I learned a valuable lesson (and reminder) this weekend while I was finishing up my javascript todo app. Everything was progressing along smoothly and I was feeling quite proud of myself when I was able to use the jQuery plugin TotalStorage to start saving the List and task objects directly to the browser in a client-side [...]
Tuesdays are always a busy day. We typically code on a Ruby project for much of the day before coming back to focus on Javascript from 6:30PM to 9ish. Today ended up being a little different and was more low-key. This week is going to be heavily focused on databases and instead of coding for [...]
You heard me right. And I expect you to hold me to it. The last two years of my professional career as a front-end developer and occasional backend coder, taught me how to search first on Google, Stack Overflow or my favorite design blog whenever I was trying to figure out how to solve a [...]
The deep, shark-infested waters of RSpec, tests and TDD are finally upon us. As I mentioned yesterday, I was still grappling with the how to think in a TDD mindset and see how this would yield productive code. I think today’s coding sessions were helpful in beginning to understand how TDD and RSpec testing can [...]
Tests. We had our first real taste of trying to write Rspec tests today. We did it in reverse order though from its conventional use in Test Driven Development (TDD). Instead of using Rspec to define the different outputs that the application should provide, we wrote tests to cover the existing design for the [...]
I’m writing now in the hope that I can close out a relatively early night. That last few days have been busy and I have a feeling my dependence on caffeine will become unsustainable if I try to do it over the next seven weeks! Today was a bit more of a mashup and we [...]
The last few days of camp have been some of the toughest yet, but have really helped me to start putting some pieces into place. On Thursday last week, I sat down to work with Phil on a simple To Do app and found myself struggling to understand how our To Do List class interacted [...]
Tonight we were privileged to hear from the founder of Pivotal Labs, which among other things is known for its dedication to Pair Programming. Rob Mee’s summed up his talk by emphasizing that over the next ten weeks, we should get really good at the basics. Become a “world-class beginner”. Rob used the analogy of [...]
Today was a day full of finishing up outstanding projects and trying to review core Ruby concepts before jumping forward again into another larger Ruby project. We didn’t really get into coding until after lunch. David and I finished up our merchantjs app which parsed through CSV data and ran through a few of the [...]
It was a busy week on Dev Bootcamp and honestly we’ve learned more in one week than I thought would be possible. We have already covered more this week than I remember covering in two 10-week classes that covered C++ and PHP than Shereef assured us today that this was a light week and that [...]
Day 1 is coming to a close here at Dev Bootcamp and the program has already succeeded in surpassing my expectations. The amount of energy and positivity in the room is invigorating. Many of the students quit their current successful careers to “start over” and their passion shows. Shereef and the rest of the team brought an [...]