Pacman and Instagram

Sorry for the lack of update but I’ve been lazy busy lately.

Last week we had a 3-day *hackathon* and worked as groups of four to build awesome apps in a relatively short-time.

I worked with Denise, Andrew and Pablo on Pacman and we actually built two versions of the game using Nodejs. One with Angular and another one using HTML5 canvas. I’ll post a link to the game when/if we deploy it on Heroku.

It was an interesting challenge and our group worked well together. Our group was representative of Makers; very diverse as we had an American, an Australian, a Spaniard and a French !

Separately, for our latest week-end challenge I built a clone of Instagram – Sardinegram!
Please signup and post your best pictures on Sardinegram.

Tomorrow we will pitch ideas for the final projects we will work on during our last two weeks at Makers. I’m sure there will be many interesting projects so I’m not really worried about that but we won’t have our say on our groups. It’s going to be the big Surprise!

Web design, Twitter clone, rails

Our challenge two weeks ago was to spend more time on the front end and create a Twitter clone. The aim was to practice CSS (styling) and jQuery (a Javascript library that allows us web app to be more *interactive*).

Web design is a time-consuming activity and can be a pain but it’s always rewarding to see the result of your hard work, and if the result is beautiful, it’s even better.

So, I spent a lot of time on this Chitter project (you can sign up and login and post comments but the reply button doesn’t work).

Disclaimer:

I used some background pictures and logos from Twitter as our challenge was to build a website which looks like Twitter as possible. In case someone from Twitter sees this and thinks I am infringing any copyright issue, please know that it’s not intentional. Contact me and I will take the website down.

This week we are working on a Ruby on Rails project. Rails is a framework that allows you to build web app super fast. I think I may use Rails for my MVP, so I better pay attention.

Midway and Gradueen

At the end of the week, I’ll have completed the first half of my 12-week bootcamp at Makers.

During these first six weeks I learned how to create a web app in Ruby language, test it with RSpec, Cucumber and Capybara and put it on the web with Sinatra and Heroku. I also learned how to do the *same* with JavaScript and jQuery, worked with PostgreSQL databases, and had a go at programming in io language and practiced writing HTML5 pages and styling them with CSS3.

That’s an amazing amount of knowledge and experience to acquire in only six weeks. It wasn’t a flawless month and a half. Sometimes, I got upset because I didn’t understand things as quickly as I would have liked; at others I was so obsessed with finding a solution and finishing a project that I couldn’t eat or sleep and became tired and moody. Nonetheless, I never regretted joining Makers Academy a single time.

More importantly, I learned a lot about how to think as a developer, which will be crucial when I’ll develop the MVP for my startup. The cherry on the cake is that I met awesome people and made some good friends I hope I will keep seeing after Makers Academy.

Being at week 6 also means that this is the last week of the August cohort. That’s sad because some people from the August cohort helped us a lot and we will miss them. The good news is that we will celebrate their graduation at a Gradueen (graduation + Halloween) party on Friday. We will also meet the new October cohort next Monday. Exciting.

My first web app

To apply what we learned on Ruby, Sinatra and Postgres databases, our last week end challenge was to build a Twitter-like app.

You can find my version here: Sardine’s chitter.

Obviously features are very basic and there are “bugs” I didn’t address, such as the fact that you can sign up even if you leave some fields empty.

I’ll make some improvements when I have time but it’s not my priority now. I will be away this week end for the second time in a row and it’s probable that I won’t be able to work on this week challenge until next week.

This week we are learning JavaScript. On Monday we learned io language as an introduction to JavaScript (because both are prototype-based languages).
Learning a new language in one day sounds crazy, right?

I quite liked io. It’s a simpler and more direct language than Ruby in my opinion and I think that anyone who has worked with Excel functions can get io’s logic quickly.

JavaScript’s syntax and testing framework (remember, we are learning test-driven-development, so every code has to be tested first) are different from Ruby’s but the logic is similar. The trickiest thing with JavaScript is its greedy use of brackets, curly brackets and semicolons everywhere. You forget one of these and your code is f*#%.

OCD

Today we had an interesting talk by Benji, founder and CEO of Picfair. He did a MVP for his startup by himself after doig a coding boot camp at General Assembly.

A thing he said struck me. He believes that to be a coder and/or an entrepreneur, you must be obsessed about it.

That’s an interesting point for me. Because I can get extremely obsessive when I’m into something.

For example, at some point in my life, I wouldn’t eat something without taking a picture (or five) of it first because I was into food photography.

When I was between two jobs three years ago I cooked a lot and I remember a week when I baked a pavlova every day because I wanted to get the perfect texture.

Currently my two obsessions are coding and Ebola – not the best conversation starters.

Despite the tragic reports on the current Ebola outbreak I have the feeling that most people around me are not very concerned about it. I personally think Ebola is the greatest risk we are currently facing, as it could threaten us as a species. Anyway, if you want to have a good scare, you can read these “reference” books on ebola: the Hot Zone by Richard Preston and Biohazard by Ken Alibek.

Week 4 already

I can’t believe I have been at Makers Academy for 3 weeks now. That’s 25% of the whole course.

I feel tired and I struggle to get out of bed in the morning but at the same time I am very happy of what I have learnt so far. Actually, I think I have never enjoyed learning something as much as coding.

I realize that most of my life, I learnt things out of necessity (French when my parents immigrated to France), constraint (how to play the piano because my parents wanted to have a daughter who knows music), or ambition (financial derivatives to get a front-office job on the financial markets).

Even if I first decided to learn how to code in order to build a MVP for my future startup (ambition?), I quickly realised that I am getting a lot of satisfaction out of the process. And that even if I hadn’t my startup in mind, I would still be happy to be learning coding, just for the sake of learning.

After learning the basics of building a system (in Ruby language) and putting it on the web (with the Sinatra framework) over the first three weeks, we are now learning how to use databases (e.g. Postgres, MySQL, Oracle).

I find the logic of databases quite easy to understand as I had to build several (Excel-based) databases to consolidate and analyse financial data in my previous position. But as with anything related to coding, it seems that syntax will be the tricky part.

Alexandrines

Since I don’t have any new dream recap to post…

When learning Ruby at makers academy,
At night when I am dreaming of refactoring,
Sometimes I see battleships in the sea floating,
Never put on the web, sunk by the enemy.

Coders Anonymous

Coding dreams

I usually have vivid dreams and remember them well. My dreams usually involve one of the following: violent death (not mine, someone else’s), bicycles, me flying, cats, me being a spy or having supernatural abilities, me driving a car (hence the violent death maybe) or me trying to run but not being able to move.

I wonder if my dreams are particularly weird or if I only remember the strange ones. Perhaps everybody has similar dreams but most people don’t remember them or don’t bother telling them? Or perhaps I’m a psychopath (but after reading Ron Jon’s great book The Psycopath Test., I don’t think I am).

Anyway, since I started learning to code, pre-course included, I have had several programming-related dreams as my brain is busy processing the huge amount of new information.

A revealing example :

I’m asleep and my husband is snoring (in my dream and IRL). In my dream, I’m trying to write a program to make him stop snoring but it doesn’t work, and I have to delete the whole code and start writing it again and again. This is very upsetting and I feel like I’m never going to write the right code to make the snoring stop…and I wake up. I push my husband and no more snoring. Conclusion: coding doesn’t solve everything.

I asked my co-makers to send me their coding-related dreams and will post them here if I receive any.

Good night now and sweet dreams.

Tuesday night update

Positives/Negatives pairings:

• The Internet is useful but it’s also a bitch with a complex language.
• I know a little bit more about Sinatra, Cucumber, HTML and CSS but I have hardly written any code today.
• I’ve done yoga twice today but I have also eaten two (small) bags of crisps.
• I feel the workload is less heavy this week and people are leaving earlier but perhaps that’s because putting Battleship on the web is such a pain in the a*s that people just don’t bother.

Start of week 3

Last week, our main task was to work as a team to build a battleship game in Ruby. This week, our objective is to put the game on the web (and make it work…).

For this, we will use Sinatra, a Ruby web application framework (for example, Apple, LinkedIn and the BBC use Sinatra). This means that if everything goes according to plan, we will have built our first web app by the end of the week.

In the same way we use RSpec to test Ruby code, we have to test the behavior of our web app with a software named Cucumber. We are also using several other Ruby programs, or Gems, such as Capybara (not the rodent). Anyway, I know so little about these programs for the moment that I could just be throwing random words. Hopefully, I will understand how these tools work together and can be used to build a great web app in the next days. But it is going to be hard work. We will also use HTML and CSS to make nice looking web pages. This is going to be a nice change from the dull command line.

Other highlights since last week:

• We watched some videos of lectures given at Stanford on “How to start a startup”. This was for people who want to be an entrepreneur after MA, rather than a developer. After the lectures, we had interesting discussions with Evgeny (MA’s co-founder) about his own experience.
• I played a lot of ping-pong, although I haven’t really improved my game.
• On Friday, I tried laughter yoga for the first time with Dana and other co-makers. It was fun and slightly awkward, but I felt very high afterwards.
• Friday afternoon free beers seem to be a recurrent thing.
• I discovered the MASH game thanks to Denise who is from the US.
• Our Friday/week-end challenge was to build a takeaway system. This was Ruby again and not very different from the Boris bikes or FAAST projects. But the interesting bit was that we had to use a gem (Twilio) to implement a text-sending service, in order to allow the “Takeaway” to send a text to their customer to confirm an order has been placed.