It’s been way too long since I’ve written a post on this particular blog, so what better occasion than to announce that after 3 1/2 years I have left my job at Coupa Software. My last day was on August 18th and I will certainly miss the friends I made there, but it was definitely time for a change.

I’ve been promising to write a wrap-up post about General Assembly and have continued to receive requests asking about what my experience was like and if I think it’s worth it. Now that it’s been almost 3 months since the program ended, I feel I can do a better job of wrapping it all up.

After 4 days of working with Ember, these are my thoughts about it.

I recently started giving myself a crash course in Ember.js to do a quick example app for a job interview. I was pretty sure I could pick it up quickly since once thing I definitely learned in the bootcamp was how to learn fast and work quickly. This certainly isn’t ideal for most real world situations because you want to produce high quality sites and apps which require proper planning, testing, and attention to detail. But it’s nice to know what I am capable of doing in a pinch.

I finally finished liberating my blog from Wordpress’ clutches a few days ago and getting it set up with Jekyll instead. It feels really great to have so much more control over it and to have it also be more lightweight.

The final project that I created in WDI was an app that had been on my mind for quite a few months because it was an app that my husband, Jesse, had been wanting someone to build since February 2013. He is an assistant debate coach and spends most of his weekends during the school year at Debate Tournaments. There is a particular way that both the judges and the teams track debate rounds and they are referred to as flows. A textbook shows an example of a flow as this:

There are two reasons that I stopped posting blog entries after the 6th week of WDI. The main reason is that I’ve simply been too busy. During the 7th week I was so busy on the 2nd project, which was a group project, and after that it just continued to stay busy; every spare minute I was either working on homework, projects, or studying. I even started to feel behind when I let myself go out a couple times. It’s no joke, you cannot try to have a social life while doing a bootcamp.

The app that I first set out to create, and the one that I presented on Demo Day on Friday are different, because I really had to scale my vision down and just produce the MVP due to lack of time. I'd like to think of what I presented as a working prototype. I plan on making it lots better.

We’ve started our first projects, so this will be a shorter summary than usual. Also, we only had a 4-day week due to Bartolomé Day, so I spent a good portion of Monday making my homework better and better and trying to study up on stuff.

It really does feel like these weeks are just blowing by so quickly. Over the weekend I stumbled across some shortcuts in TextMate that I didn’t realize existed and made me love the software even more. The first couple days of the week were very mini-project based, which was nice. I said to my husband Tuesday night, “I’ve made 3 basic web apps this week…and it’s only Tuesday.” It’s really nice to have things like that to show the progress we’re making. First business of the week was that they mixed up the Camels and the Snakes, because when they polled us they found that we wanted more interaction with the other students. So I had to switch into the Camel classroom, which I like a lot better because there’s no glare on my glossy computer screen causing me extreme difficulty all day.

This blog post from Nicholas Zakas is the best explanation I’ve seen online for doing a merge sort in JavaScript. Most of the other posts I looked at give you code, but don’t talk you through it. I knew there was a reason I buy his books!

I made it onto the props board!

As I suspected, blogging every day was impossible; too busy with homework. So here is an overview of the week.

Yesterday was the first day of class. I arrived out of breath and sweaty from my exertions of trying not be late on the first day. Normally this would not be an issue but for some reason all three public transit methods from Alameda were backed up today. It’s the first time ever that I’ve seen the parking lot at the ferry terminal in Alameda completely full.

I am a member of the SF Ruby Meet Up group. Today I checked my email and saw a message thread from the group that made me feel sick to my stomach. A woman had sent a message to the group saying that she was looking for women developers for an internship and those interested should email her. The first couple replies were very reasonable ones from men giving her a heads up that it is illegal to discriminate based on gender, and that they would recommend not listing genders in job postings. These replies weren’t attacking her, they were factual, and she immediately sent a reply apologizing for the mistake and welcomed those of all genders to apply. Everything’s cool then, right?

A lot of my closest friends have been following along on my private Twitter account with my career journey this year, but I can finally talk about it a bit more publicly. In February I decided that it was time to start pursuing my passions again and get back to working on my career in tech. My goal since December of 2011 has been to be a professional front-end web developer instead of just a hobbyist front-end web developer. To that end I spent a couple months of my unemployment trying to advance my skills at home independently. HTML and CSS have been in the bag since I was a teenager but I knew I needed to finally learn JavaScript and JQuery and build up a portfolio. Unfortunately, this wasn’t progressing as quickly as I had hoped, as the resources I was using to learn weren’t very great. In addition, I really needed a source of income, so I was spending a lot of time applying to anything I could find in order to pay the bills. After 5 months of unemployment I eventually got a job as an Office Manager at Viator, Inc and my career goals were put on hold.

One of the things that I value in the workplace is efficiency. At every company I’ve worked for I’ve delighted in discovering and implementing more efficient methods of carrying out tasks. Being that I’m often the most tech savvy person at a lot of the companies I’ve worked for, I’ve strived to help them adopt newer technologies and methods of running more efficiently, whenever I’m in a position to do so. The managing teams are often very enthusiastic about this, sometimes I’m even part of the managing team, but I’ve sometimes found it very hard to get employees to accept and adopt newer technologies and/or newer methods. This serves as a great frustration for me; when I’ve spent a lot of time and effort trying to make things better for other people and they just dismiss it.

Here’s to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes. The ones who see things differently. They’re not fond of rules. And they have no respect for the status quo. You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them. About the only thing you can’t do is ignore them. Because they change things. They push the human race forward. And while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do.

Apple Inc.

Read More »

I’ve spent most of the last week up to my elbows in fixing computers, setting up computers, and general technology. It should be enough to make someone’s head explode. I sometimes think, “What would we do without it?” and yet I am the last generation that can remember what it was like without it. We get so used to habits though I can understand how we get so lazy. The other day I was going to ask a friend to give me his address before I stopped having a printer so I could print out directions from mapquest because how in the world would I find it otherwise and then I thought, “No, you’ll do it the old fashioned way and you’ll deal with it!” as memories of friends giving extensive directions about “turn left on this street, go 5 blocks…” flooded my brain.