Blog


Welcome to my Blog

Asking Good Questions

I have learned over the last couple of months that one incredibly important aspect of the programmer and developer community is asking questions. There are an unbelievable amount of resources online for answering coding questions. Though stackoverflow.com is the major one, there are ton's of technical blogs and Youtube tutorials available to help you when your stuck. What's important about using these resources is that you both understand your question, and understand how to ask it....




Conflict

This is a big one for me, and one that keeps coming up as I grow older. Ulitmately the conflict is, do you disappoint a friend and not include them if the work is better without them. It's a really, really, tough question, and one I don't have an answer for, but in this post I'm going to analyze it, and talk about the times it has happened in my life...




Regular Expressions

"What the ^(?=*\d)" are they!?"

One topic I have coninued to come across during phase 0 was "regex's" or Regular Expressions. In some early challenges at DBC, they would have warning statements like "don't use Regular Expressions to solve this problem." This got me thinking...so, regular expressions make solving this problem easy huh? It's also hard to scan the pages of stackoverflow and not see regex's everywhere. So, now that I'm a little more seasoned with all this stuff, I figure it's time to see what all the fuss is about...




Values

Positive Affirmation, and the Values Close to Me

Upon examaning all the values important to me, I found it hard to focus on only a couple of them, because they are all related in some way. They represent important human qualities, and they represent how we treat ourselves, each other, and the world around us. But the value I chose to reflect upon is enthusiasm...




Stereotype Threat

How "bad-vibes" actually bring us down

A fascinating new field in social psychology is the "Stereotype Threat." Pioneered by Claude Steele, stereotype threat refers to the phenomenon of stereotyped individuals actually conforming to the stereotype they belong to. The data is scary, because stereotype threats exist everywhere, and we are all constantly battling around them. It shows us just how influenced we are by experiences around us, and how much our own psychology depends on our perception of ourselves. It reminds us how important positive re-enforcement is, and how detrimental negativity can be....




Modules vs Classes

Cute kitty, BAD KITTY!

This week we dove deeper in classes in Ruby. Classes provide great organizational structure to your code, because they allow you to group your code, and be able to call certain methods from a class only if they correspond to that class. If we think about Ruby's inheritance structure, Modules are the parents to classes. Where as a class and all of it's attributes and methods apply to each instance of a class, a Module can be applied to a class if it is included in that class. We'll dive into that now, using the example of my cute, cuddly, and sometimes evil cat Scarlett....




Pairing and Feedback

When starting out at Dev Bootcamp, and reading about pair-programming, I thought only one thing; that this must be their way of forcing us to interact with our classmates. One of the major problems with online education, though still in it's infancy, is there is no interaction between students. So, it made sense to me why they would require this. What I didn't really see coming was how beneficial pairing is to both learning and teaching the information...




Students in a Class

Before starting here at Dev Bootcamp, I was a music teacher in NYC. The first week of every "mod" (as it was called) was tough, as any teacher will tell you. You have a room full of new kids, many of whom you have never seen before, and your job is to start connecting and instructing them right away. I thought it would make sense to make a nice little ruby program to help me remember the students in my class...




Computer Vision Syndrome

In the digital era that we live in, our lives our filled with...screens. We're watching TV, while responding the emails on our computer, while watching the twitter feed on our phones. Some might say we're addicted to our devices. After a long day of staring at a computer at work, we come home and relax by staring at a different computer at home. One of the outcomes? Computer Vision Syndrom ...




Enumerable Methods

This week was all about using ruby's Enumerable methods. These methods can be your friend, but at first they are likely to be your enemy. For me at least, it was tough to simply wrap my head around what it is they actually do. I hope this will clear that up...




Thinking Style

As we prepared to enter Phase-0 of Dev Bootcamp, we we're asked to complete a variety of surveys to examine our learning style, and thinking style. I remember at the time thinking this was very unique. Never had a class told me to examine these traits about myself before we started...




Arrays & Hashes in Ruby

This week we began our journey into Ruby, the programming language of all programming languages. It has been a great experience. Ruby is prized for being relatively intuitive as far as programming languages go. I want to highlight two key features that make storing and accessing data incredibly simple, Arrays and Hashes...




Display Properties in CSS

Inline, Block, and Inline-Block

This week we have been learning about css and html, to markup languages that make websites look pretty. Upon building a website, one aspect that you are sure to come across is how to display your elements on a page. Putting a box here and a box there may not be as easy as you think. But once you understand the "display" property in css, it becomes a lot easier....




Kitchen Vs Table

My Thoughts on the culture at DBC

After watching Shareef's Fireside Chat, I feel confident in the structure and philosophy they have established here at Dev Bootcamp. I thought his point about us living our lives as consumers was very accurate. We so often look at the outcome of an action before it has even started, completely missing the fact that the process is more important than the outcome...