I’ve been practicing my JavaScript for the HackReactor interview on the 20th (wish me luck by the way). They sent around an email saying to be prepared so you didn’t have to reschedule (I’m suddenly glad I couldn’t get an appointment straightaway). They recommended being able to get through all the easy challenges on Coderbyte in < 5 minutes. Yikes? Surprisingly not. I’m having a lot of fun.

There are a couple things I’ve obviously forgotten (I had to look up the regex to keep only alpha characters, I suck at regex), but I’m pretty fast. I’m also realizing just how not amazing I am at the trickier puzzles. There are one or two in there that I still don’t understand, even after I caved and looked up how others solved them (Array Addition I, I’m glaring at you).

There are 26 easy challenges. I’ve decided to run through at least 10 a day, so I finished the first 10 today and uploaded them to my GitHub. My favorite one so far was the TimeConvert, which took a number (e.g. 126) and converted to the amount of hours and minutes (e.g. 2:6). I could have made it prettier by added a preceding 0 in the minutes, but the goal of these is speed and the instructions didn’t ask for that pretty extra. This was my favorite because I just have this weird love for modulus. The code to solve it:

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function TimeConvert(num) {
  var minutes = num % 60;
  var hours = parseInt(num/60);

  return "" + hours + ":" + minutes;
}

I got a conditional acceptance from App Academy. I have to do the homework and take one more coding test before they will let me in because I bombed the last coding interview. I’m actually not upset at all. I was worried that I was going to feel obligated to go when I really want to see how my interview with Hack Reactor goes. I understand that App Academy would be a good choice from a finances perspective, but the raw talent that they seem to be churning out of Hack Reactor is really intriguing, especially when Ruby isn’t my favorite language and JavaScript was the first one I ever learned.

Updates as they come! Hack Reactor interview isn’t until the 20th and I probably won’t try to finish up the App Academy homework until around that time as well.

I just made something! For the first time ever I made a stupid little ruby program to do something that a PivotTable was giving me fits over at work. I had a spreadsheet like so:

But what I really needed was a text file that I could print and hand out to people like so:

And I did it with the power of Ruby! I was so proud of myself. I’ve never taken a real world problem (from my work no less) and made a tiny bit of code do exactly what I want it to. It just adds to my love of coding.

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require 'csv'

contents = CSV.open "strengths.csv", headers: true, header_converters: :symbol
File.open("out.txt", 'w') do |f|
  contents.each do |row|
    headers = contents.headers
      name = row[0]
    strength = {}
      i = 1
    while i < row.length
      if row[i]
        strength[(row[i].to_i)] = i
      end
      i += 1
    end
    f.write("#{name} \n")
    stren = strength.sort_by { |k, v| k }

    stren.each do |k,v|
      f.write("\t #{headers[v].to_s.capitalize} \n")
    end
    f.write("\n")
  end
end

And yes, those are my StrengthsFinder top 5 in the second picture. Everyone at work had to do them and I think mine are very accurate.

Just got my email confirming a 2nd interview with App Academy. Well, I feel less bad now. Now I just get to feel nervous all over again for another coding test! Go me!

As an addition to my post below about App Academy. I’m starting to feel less confident in myself. I did well on the second coding test and I’m through the first interview now but according to the website I assumed that meant it was my only interview. Not so said the TA who put me through a coding test. So ugh. I was nervous, I got it done, but not prettily and I made some stupid mistakes. When I finished I was upset and called both my parents and my best friend. My dad was the best about the whole situation. He just wanted to make sure I wouldn’t give up if I didn’t get in to this ONE program. He was right.

I spent the rest of the evening prepping applications to the other programming schools in the Bay Area. I finished one for Coding Dojo and got an email this morning to set up an interview next week! I also applied to HackReactor which has suddenly vaulted itself to the top of my list. Not gonna lie, the free gym and really high success rate of graduates makes me happy. Both of those programs are also in November so they are my three that I’m most excited about. I also will probably apply to Dev Bootcamp and Hackbright, but they aren’t until next year and I don’t want to wait that long if I don’t have to.

Every morning when I wake up Jack stretches to fill up the entire bed. It’s like he’s mocking me as I get ready to go to work. Look what I get to do today.

Someday I’ll be a better writer of my thoughts. In the mean time, there is a lot to catch up on. My bestest, best friend got into Hackbright! She starts in September. I am so ridiculously happy for her, not in the least because I feel like I taught her most of what she knows about coding currently and I can’t wait to be able to have deep, nerdy conversations when she’s all done with the mind-meld that is programming. It’s a little bittersweet for me as I was the one who initially sent her the link. I’d been thinking about trying for it myself, but the timeline just wasn’t right this year.

Hackbright became my gateway drug, however. I found out they weren’t the only game in town. There are all shapes and sizes of programming bootcamps and after reviewing a lot of them, I’m currently in the process of applying for App Academy. Application and first coding test are a check. I’m literally taking a break from studying for the second coding test to type this up. So second round of coding and then (fingers crossed) a coding interview left to go before I wait with bated breath to find out if I get the best birthday present ever (birthday - Nov 14, start date - Nov 18!).

Besides hopefully an entire life shift I’ve been sticking to my routine of Coursera class. Startup Engineering is at its halfway point and I have a shell of a crowdfunding idea here. Oh yeah, the Code Girls and Octavia are real things, sort of. They are mostly in the brains of the three of us (aforementioned bestest, best friend and my other best friend) but I’ve said out loud to myself that I want a working project within 5 years, so obviously I have to do it now.

Other than that: quietness. I spent two weeks in California earlier this month and spent most of the time falling deeper in love with the Bay Area. I came back and bought myself a Mac (for those keeping score, I now technically own 4-5 laptops, but two have been handed down to my parents, one I received for free and it doesn’t really work anyway, the 4th is a tiny fun Linux netbook and the 5th is the new shiny MacBook Air I lovingly call “Monster”). This Mac represents my promise to myself it is my first true “dev” machine. The first things I installed on it were Ruby and Python and all the little bits that go along with that.

Wish me luck. I think I should probably be studying.

I couldn’t even finish the first Coursera course without starting another one. This time it’s Data Science. Yummy, yummy data that I get to program into submission. We are starting off with a trip through the Twitter API and I finally learned that JSON isn’t as scary as I thought it was when I didn’t know anything about it! Go me! We did a number of things with Twitter and some Python programming. The last part of the assignment was my favorite, the most popular hashtags. Some of my code (for a different section on finding tweet locations):

And my hashtag results from a 10 minute snapshot of new tweets to Twitter:

In theory I understand hashtags. In practice they bug me, especially the ones like the above “#YouWillNotBeTakenSeriouslyIf”. Ugh. Anyway, I actually went wild and crazy and Googled some of the hashtags, because most of them mean nothing to me. I even learned some Spanish! Seamos sinceros = “let’s be honest” which sounds just like another of the type of hashtags that bother me.

The quietness of this weblog isn’t a reflection on my life, more like the inverse of my life now. I’ve started a more grownup sleep schedule then “wake up 20 minutes before you have to leave for work, roll out of bed and throw your hair in a ponytail”. I now go to bed at the same time every night and wake up to my alarm (no snoozing! okay, maybe one hit of the snooze button).

All this so I can wake up at 5:30 and start a version of Couch to 5k. But me being me I couldn’t do the normal old c25k, no! Instead I chose zombies (because I have loved zombies since before they were cool, yeah that’s right, I’m being that annoying person who talks about bands no one knows)! Zombies, Run! or actually their Zombie 5k intro to be exact is my zombified program. You can find my runs (and the ridiculous pop music I find necessary to wake me up at 5:30 am on my ZombieLink profile). My goal is to finish the 5k program and then start their actual Season content. I have promised to gift myself with expensive, pretty running shoes if I get that far. On my current shortlist:

Hoka One One Stinson Tarmac

Supposedly this is like “running on pillows” and is designed for the type of running I do - on concrete as I run around the concrete jungle of my city’s downtown. It’s the most expensive one on my list and my least pretty choice, but it’s still at the top because I think it would be super comfy.

Nike Air Max Tailwind+ 5

Probably the best mix of bright and comfy. I love anything that screams NEON PINK. Only when I exercise am I a girly girl.

Nike Air Pegasus+ 29

Probably my fav color combo, but it’s out of stock in my size so it’s probably not going to happen. I’m keeping it on the list just in case.

And there we go. I’ve added another obsessive hobby to my life. But at least the running is the first physically good thing I’ve become obsessed with. I think I need to find a zombie t-shirt to run in…

Whoohoo. The Interactive Python class over at Coursera just opened up. I decided to sign up for with a friend of mine who has much less programming experience than I do. Mostly for the lulz and because I’ve discovered I love teaching other people about my (limited) knowledge. I started her off just building websites then started her on JavaScript and I finally showed her the prettiness of Python and she wanted to learn it too.

Also I’m messing around with the layout of this website. So it will probably be a bit messy for the next few weeks (I say weeks because I’m down with a cold and my brain is having a hard time focusing for long periods).