Week 3 ended a few days back (sorry y’all I had a busy weekend) and it was awesome. I’m learning new intricacies of our systems and learning to be more confident in myself when I know I know it (or maybe even think I do! Being wrong isn’t the end of the world!). My favorite part of this week though was the weekend.

On Saturday I got to volunteer at an all girl (10-17) JavaScript intro class with CoderDojo. I was a tech mentor, but I didn’t have to do a lot . I was super impressed with the girls! And I got to teach a couple of them that docs are super helpful! They were all so creative and awesome and I hope a lot of them decide that programming is as awesome as I think it is. For a short write-up (and to see what some of the girls made!) check out the write up for the event here.

Also, as an aside, can I just take a moment to say that I think Pamela Fox is amazeballs? She spoke at Hack Reactor during my time there and I’ve been following her on Twitter for a while, but I fan-girled hard when I realized she was the instructor for the class. She is such a smart, funny presenter and she was amazing with the girls. I aspire to be more like her when I “grow up”.

I could see myself filling my weekends with tech mentoring/hanging out at places like Women Who Code, Girl Develop It, and PyLadies. It’s something that I’m super passionate about (it’s why I wanted to work at Udacity so badly). I think mainly because it’s something I wish I had when I was growing up. I wish I could have seen women being awesome programmers, making a career out of it, and how much fun it could be. I never thought I would be one of those people who didn’t just have a “job” they had a calling, but I’m positive I’ve found me.

First week of work is over and it felt a lot like a less intense week of Hack Reactor. I still can’t believe this is what I’m actually doing with my life. I still definitely have lots and lots of impostor syndrome but I also deployed live things my first week! And learned a few of my coworkers names! And did a two minute all staff demonstration on how to knit!

I also got exactly what I wanted. I’m working full stack in JavaScript and Python in non startup-y startup (e.g., we’re not out to make lots and lots of money or making a product we don’t believe in for the money) doing things that I feel are making a tangibly good contribution. We have a gong that gets rung when a person graduates a class. That small bit right there proved that I was exactly where I wanted to be.

And yes, I’m still terrified some days that I’m too slow or too newb or just not cut out for this, but here’s a secret, I don’t think that will ever go away. Maybe it’s a good thing or maybe it’s just human nature, but I just need to learn to live in my own skin I think and take the impostor syndrome as a mark of being human, of caring about my work and wanting to always get better.

And a minor update: Selma is no longer in the house, I got the balls to move her outside finally.

My week started out fairly average. We were all rolling along on our projects and then I noticed an event on the Hack Reactor Senior calendar. Tuesday, three weeks from this past Tuesday, is Hiring Day. Three weeks?? Not even now, more like two?? Oh, god. And yet, as much of a whirlwind as this has been and as often as I have impostor syndrome, I’m a little excited. I want to see what’s out there for me and find a job and learn and grow and do my instructors proud.

One slight stumbling block for me this week: Hacker in Residence positions. I applied and think I would have been accepted, but I had to bow out. After I sat down and thought about it, I just couldn’t justify being out of work that much longer (even on a stipend). It would have been fun to learn how to teach and spend some more time hacking on personal ideas, but that’s what weekends are for, right?

We also got to demo Helix for the first time. Helix is a gene visualization app that shows you your SNPs (base pairs) from 23andme that have traits attached to them (according to SNPedia.com). You can search traits or just browse your chromosomes for interesting info. It was built using a private beta framework (called Famo.us) that my team was lucky enough to get to be involved with. We have fingers crossed two more opportunities to demo Helix, one more run through at Hack Reactor and if all goes well, a private party/meetup for Famous.

Another fun thing that came out of Helix was that I got to dust off my Python knowledge. I had wanted to try BeautifulSoup (a Python web scraper) for a while now and I needed an easy way to pull rsid information from SNPedia so I created my own API wrapper! The code is available (including instructions on how to run it on your own) on my github account. It’s a tiny Python/Flask server that only has a couple of endpoints (the ones I really needed) but I’m thinking about expanding eventually.

And then I got sick. I came down with a cold on Friday and haven’t been to HackReactor since. I’ve been working from home, but mostly just trying to sleep, having weird dreams, and sounding pitiful. I’m getting better though and I will definitely be on-point on Monday to work out the last-minute details of Helix before all the demos come crashing around us.

Three more weeks until I graduate! My gift to myself - I’m attending the LAUNCH hackathon with two other women from HackReactor the weekend after it’s all over. I just don’t want to get lazy!

Sorry for the delay in this post. My roommate, Ava, was worried about my long hours all week so she wouldn’t let me touch my laptop on Sunday. Saturday night was card games with Hack Reactor peeps so I was out late. It was a jumble of a week and I’m writing this so late that this week is already upon me. So I think this one will be very short.

We started working at Famo.us this past week. They have a beautiful office that was converted from an apartment. It’s weird to go back to Hack Reactor now with their darker rooms and only two bathrooms, but I still miss it something fierce when I’m away. Hack Reactor feels like home, but Famo.us is a nice vacation. Our project is slowly progressing. We have some really neat ideas about gene visualization and if all goes well we’ll get to demo the awesomeness in front of a bunch of people.

Other fun things from this week included a talk on Thursday from the author of Cracking the Coding Interview and Saturday social night where I got my ass handed to me in Marvel vs. Capcom and then made people squirm in Cards Against Humanity.

One final thing: Ava talked me into buying a FitBit! I’ve been meeting all my goals every day and it’s pink so life is pretty amazing. You can find me on Fitbit here.

Coming back from break was wonderful. I really missed this place and these people and I’m at a point now where I’m excited to walk in the front door of this space. I am really, truly a Software Engineer. I have been for a long time, but it took this place and these people to pull that knowledge out of myself. I started the week with giant hugfests of awesome. It was great to see everyone after two weeks. There was some unexpected lack of (and new growth of) facial hair and general fun stories about hijinks had during our time away. We all quickly felt the glory of being seniors and then were promptly blown away by how awesome the new batch of juniors are.

There wasn’t much time to chat though, juniors were starting their hell week and we were about to embark on a different sort of hell - Hiring Day Assessments. I was terrified. I’ve decided my brain just needs to have something to focus on being terrified about to function at all - I’m starting to wonder if losing my fear would also diminish my awesomeness. We had all day to finish our assessments and as I dove in my confidence built. I knew this stuff. I knew it from the times it had been drilled into my head and the moments when I was working on something alone and would need to Google a concept and those times at the lunch table with my peers discussing wild and crazy new concepts. It rocked to realize how awesome we all are now. Everyone can tell us we are awesome until their blue in the face, but it’s moments like that when it clicks for me.

The other moments it clicks for me is the new, terribly unfunny programming jokes we’ve all started making. It’s getting ridiculous.

After Monday’s stress, we quickly got our hands dirty in our code. Our first round of group projects wrapped this week. I worked with Sara and João to make a custom html5 video player plugin to vote on moments in videos and visualize the user data. Our project is called HeatVote. We’re still hacking on it in our “free time”, but its production cycle is officially over. There are a few previous posts on things I worked on for this project and I feel like I have a book more to write about the experience, but time is, as my faithful readers know, very short lately so I’m going to close this book for now.

Our next project period starts on Tuesday. I was fortunate enough to get a client project working with an awesome team to create mobile web apps at famo.us! I am very excited to dive into unfamiliar territory, learn, and help out a team of super talented people.

Do you have all the data and none of the visuals? Do you just want a pretty, fast way to compare lots of data that centers around maybe just a handful of moments?

D3.js can help you tame all of your data and d3.rollup is especially useful if you have lots of data that you need to combine into just a couple of data points. All it takes is a couple of (pretty long) lines of code and you will have an awesome visual that’s very customizable.

Lets start with a really straightforward example of a rollup. In all of these examples, I’m using code straight from my HeatVote project, which requires me to pull voting data from our server API that I receive as a JSON blob. Here’s an example entry:

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{ video_id: 'T-D1KVIuvjA',
  timestamp: 2,
  vote: 1,
  id: 1,
  createdAt: Sat Dec 21 2013 14:55:42 GMT-0800 (PST),
  updatedAt: Sat Dec 21 2013 14:55:42 GMT-0800 (PST) }

Now obviously there are a bunch of these, and technically there are easier ways to do this, but to show off the structure of a rollup, lets count how many entries we had in our database using a d3 rollup!

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var total = d3.nest()
  .rollup(function(d){
    return d.length;
  })
  .entries(data);

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var averages = d3.nest()
  .key(function(d) {
    return d.timestamp;
  })
  .sortKeys(d3.ascending)
  .rollup(function(d){
    return d3.mean(d, function(g) {
      return +g.vote;
    });
   })
   .entries(data);

Now there is a lot going on in this very compact few lines, so well go through them one by one, but the result is that averages is equal to an array of objects with the properties key (that is equal to each unique timestamp) and value (that is equal to the mean of all votes at that timestamp).

So lets break it down:

• .key(...) is just used to tell the function what our keys are, only grabbing unique values of that property.
• .sortKeys is just a prettiness thing, it sorts my keys into an order (when they’re pulled off the server the only order is by the time they were created on the database).
• and finally our lovely .rollup(...). Now instead of d being an array of the whole data, it’s now an array of only the data for each individual key (so all of the data with the same timestamp). The inner function d3.mean takes a specific property from all of the data for each key and averages them up.
  And that, is d3 rollup in a nutshell, it’s really lovely at coercing relationships out of your raw data and you can obviously do a lot more with it that just averaging things. The d3 nest docs are probably the next best place to look to get your hands dirty (.rollup is a property of nest).

If you just need to get a node server up and running with very few lines of code then you hopefully already know about Node/Express (if you don’t, the Express website has a pretty good intro tutorial and has good documentation to get started serving up static assets). If you need all of that and to be able to route queries to a database quickly and easily then you might not know about the awesome power of Sequelize.

If you haven’t messed around with a ORM (Object Relational Mapper, a program that maps your code to a database) before, Sequelize is a really straight forward one to start with.

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var voteTable = sequelize.define('vote', {
  video_id: Sequelize.STRING,
  timestamp: Sequelize.INTEGER,
  vote: Sequelize.INTEGER
});

voteTable.sync();

Once I had my server set up (and installed the sequelize dependencies). This was the line of code I needed to use to create a new table for my current group project. Sequelize automatically includes extra columns like unique id and created at/updated at timestamps (there are ways to tell it not to too).

The rest of the initial set up is easy too, but it’s well documented over in the Sequelize docs. The fun part comes when you can start to make your database more modular. The first thing I did was to take out the actual username/password information from my database connection. I stored them as an object in a separate JavaScript file (so I could add it to .gitignore and not share my passwords with the world).

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//module.exports allows us to use this code in other places as a node module,
//we'll see it again when I make the database calls modular
module.exports = {
  database: 'database_name',
  username: 'username',
  password: 'secret_password',
  host: 'host_url',
  port: 5432,
  dialect: 'postgres', //obviously you don't have to use PostgreSQL
  native: true //required for Heroku Postgres (I'll cover that in another post)
};

I saved that snipped to a file called db_config.js at the root directory and then created my main database module in the subfolder /controller/ called database.js. So to have access to the private config object, all I need to do is set up my dependencies, import the db_config file, and I can start using my config variables to connect to my database:

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var Sequelize = require('sequelize');
var pg = require('pg').native; //again this line is specific to using a Postgres database
var config = require('../db_config');

var sequelize = new Sequelize(config.database, config.username, config.password, {
  host: config.host,
  port: config.port,
  dialect: config.dialect,
  native: config.native //Heroku Postgress again
});

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module.exports.createVote = function(req, res){
  //code to bundle up the created object and save it do the database
};

module.exports.getVotes = function(req, res){
  //code to find votes based on specific requests from the user
};

Now to have access to these functions (which are a part of the database.js node module, thanks to the module.exports object which is a feature of Node) I only need to require database.js in my main server app and call the functions where I need them:

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var database = require('./controllers/database');

//many lines later
app.post('/votes', database.createVote);
app.get('/votes/:vidID', database.getVotes);

The /votes/:vidID is a handy trick of Express to pass information to the server. The value gets attached to the req.param.vidID property so I can use it when I request specific information from the server. For example if I wanted to query for results from a video ID of 123 I would send a post request to /votes/123 and then my req.param.vidID === 123.

One last trick, in Sequelize when you query the database you get back quite a few more rows than you might expect. When I query my voteTable (the one I only explicitly created three columns for?) I get back something that looks like this monster:

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{ dataValues:
     { video_id: '7QBgK0_RbkE', timestamp: 2, vote: 1, id: 192,
       createdAt: Sun Dec 22 2013 22:19:33 GMT-0800 (PST),
       updatedAt: Sun Dec 22 2013 22:19:33 GMT-0800 (PST) },
    __options:
     { timestamps: true, createdAt: 'createdAt', updatedAt: 'updatedAt',
       deletedAt: 'deletedAt', touchedAt: 'touchedAt', instanceMethods: {}, classMethods: {},
       validate: {}, freezeTableName: false, underscored: false, syncOnAssociation: true,
       paranoid: false, whereCollection: [Object], schema: null, schemaDelimiter: '',
       language: 'en', defaultScope: null, scopes: null, hooks: [Object], omitNull: false,
       hasPrimaryKeys: false },
    hasPrimaryKeys: false,
    selectedValues:
     { video_id: '7QBgK0_RbkE', timestamp: 2, vote: 1, id: 192,
       createdAt: Sun Dec 22 2013 22:19:33 GMT-0800 (PST),
       updatedAt: Sun Dec 22 2013 22:19:33 GMT-0800 (PST) },
    __eagerlyLoadedAssociations: [],
    isDirty: false,
    isNewRecord: false,
    daoFactoryName: 'votes',
    daoFactory:
     { options: [Object], name: 'votes', tableName: 'votes', rawAttributes: [Object],
       daoFactoryManager: [Object], associations: {}, scopeObj: {}, primaryKeys: {},
       primaryKeyCount: 0, hasPrimaryKeys: false, autoIncrementField: 'id', DAO: [Object] }
 }

And that’s just ONE entry in the database! To fix that add an option to your sequelize query: {raw: true} so the query would look like:

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voteTable.findAll(query, {raw: true})

And one entry of output would be:

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{ video_id: 'T-D1KVIuvjA',
  timestamp: 2,
  vote: 1,
  id: 1,
  createdAt: Sat Dec 21 2013 14:55:42 GMT-0800 (PST),
  updatedAt: Sat Dec 21 2013 14:55:42 GMT-0800 (PST) }

That is enough database tricks for today. If you want to just stare at my code for a while to create & retrieve votes from our database you can find my gist here (with sanitized login info for the db_config). The real (still being modded by the team) code is forked on my GitHub. I have a few more of these in the works from my adventures slinging code and I hope to post a few more before Hack Reactor starts back up and I lose all free time again.

The tiny bit of Hack Reactor/git humor above is going to be lost on most of my audience but it made me happy. This week felt a bit like the first week of the program. A bit of uncertainty, a lot of excitement.

We were turned loose this week. No more structured lessons, it’s the start of the projects phase. The first two days were devoted to a “hackathon” where I learned angular and firebase and created a bookmarking app that included full-text search and a companion Chrome extension. That was super exciting. It was awesome to build something with my own two hands and realize all that I’ve learned in the past six weeks. Even if something didn’t work right off the bat, I now have the confidence to read through the documentation and understand what individual pieces weren’t functioning the way I expected them to. One of my best strengths has definitely been my super-human ability to craft a google search query.

The rest of the week has been a move into group projects and learning a whole new skill-set. I’m a get-along kind of person by nature and it was hard at first for me to feel like I wasn’t stepping on toes when I wanted to work on a specific part of our project. After a day or so of planning and modeling what we wanted to do though, it became easier to split up tasks. I learned Asana (a project tracking app) and got really good at dividing up tasks.

My favorite part of our new app is that I got to deep dive into d3 (a JavaScript library for data visualizations) functionality and create a homegrown heat-map. Some of my notes are up on GitHub, but I plan on refactoring and creating a whole post on the heat-map process (spoiler: d3.rollup is my savior).

I am very content this week. I’m getting a taste of what the real world is going to look like for me as a software engineer (an unfortunate side effect is that I’m getting a real taste for coffee to keep up with the long Hack Reactor hours). Now though, I’m sitting in SFO waiting for my plane to PDX and home for Christmas. I’ll miss the beautiful (and non-rainy) sites of San Francisco, but I’m excited to visit family and show them how much I’ve changed.

Another roller coaster week. Worst points: Someone took my laptop charger while I was in lecture, my week 3 assessment was not my finest point, and I miss my cats something desperately. Best points: I worked with my two favorite pair-partners again because I couldn’t handle this week otherwise, I had an awesome girl’s lunch today with 4/5ths of the junior class women (there are 5 of us total), and I made a node.js server!

So I definitely felt my first crazy/not enough sleep/irrational emotions. When my power cord was jacked a couple of days ago I was devastated. In retrospect, I think I’m a little tired and cranky and, like I said previously, I am in desperate need of some kitty cuddle time. I’ve been in California now for over a month and I still love it, but it’s definitely getting more difficult. There are times I wish I could just zen out and I only really get that on the trains or at midnight in the dark when I should be sleeping so I can wake up and do it all again the next morning at 6am to catch my train.

I have never been more excited/motivated to get up in the morning in my life and I can’t get to sleep at night because code and other things are running through my head and along the way something had to give. I’ve discovered that when something has to give it’s my emotional stability. My actual sprints were amazeballs, especially since I had awesome pairs (Sara and Andy, respectively) for my Backbone and Node.js sprints. But in my quiet moments or while I was working solo the doubt and sadness came back.

So I did what I always do when I’m sad - I talked to my parents, a lot. I called them while waiting for the train, I called them sitting on the couch in the Hack Reactor lobby during lunch, and I called them while I drove home at 9pm every night. My dad especially is awesome at making me feel better. He’s always so proud of me and he’s always interested in what I’m doing. It’s hard sometimes here, but I have an amazing support system both in Oregon and here. My platonic life partner Ava and her husband John have been my rocks in more ways than one. My new awesome friends at Hack Reactor, especially the ladies of the Nov ‘13 cohort have been awesome to get to know. And I know all my family, friend, and former coworkers back in Oregon love me and miss me as much or more than I love and miss them.

Thinking about it and even writing about it has helped as well. Getting it off my chest makes it so I can breathe again. So I guess I just want to say, I love you all. Thank you for dealing with me! I really am happy even if I didn’t sound it sometimes this week. If I don’t just sleep all of tomorrow/spend my day in San Jose with other awesome people I love to pieces, I’m going to try to post a non-emotional/tired/whiny post, but honestly, I want to keep this blog real. For me as well as for you and this what has dominated my brain this week.

I have had a very productive weekend so far (and it’s only Saturday!). I am spending some of my day today going back through my easy Coderbyte solutions and cleaning most of them up. I will also be adding in comments for most of the lines explaining my logic. So a lot of the files will look like this:

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function FirstReverse(str) {
  return str.split("")  //splits the string into an array of characters
            .reverse()  //reverses the array
            .join("");  //joins the array back into a string, with no space between the characters
}

This is actually a lot of fun for me. Now that we’re getting into more abstract concepts like MVCs and servers it’s nice to just go back and power through some JavaScript code and understand exactly what it’s doing.

As always, you can find my coderbyte solutions on GitHub (I will be posting updates to it throughout the day), but I feel like I need to start adding a caveat, because of the amount of people who have said they found my blog looking for coderbyte solutions. Just staring at my code isn’t going to make you understand JavaScript. You need to do it for yourself. If you’re brand new to JavaScript, just seeing the cool tricks is not going to make you a programmer. I really recommend things like Udacity, Codecademy and other sites that talk about the fundamentals of comp sci/programming.