First Week at the Coding Dojo, a coding bootcamp

Woke up Saturday morning, exhausted. Haven't had to work so hard and be a "sponge" for a while. Shockingly even compared to Stanford and consultant life, this was a big ramp up. I told my sensei: for the first time ever, I had to seriously look at the syllabus (I was mostly a free spirit in college, cram at the end or just power through).

Two every important parts of a given boot camp: the instructors including mentors and equally important, the peers. 

Long-term front-end developers, webmasters, writers/editors, musicians and people who recently left their job like me all ended up here. People came here to learn skills they never knew or to connect the scattered dots that they learnt here and there. And whenever I get comfortable, I will be dazzled by my peers' impressive work and dedication, and get back down to earth again.

Perhaps more important than the actual video and live tutorials, is the "preaching of the sensei" much like the master of the Karate Kid: he will push you to stick with the fundamentals and improve gradually, except, the difference is: he will also show you the way.

The sensei will have to show us the way not just by exemplifying it. None of us had any doubts that there are computer geniuses out there, but the question is: can we be a web developer? Or can we even code? Our instructor Michael did that by showing us that we are all able to easily write the HTML for all websites, the styling and design are the tricky part. Strip out of the CSS, websites can look very ugly when naked.

Then the influence of the peers matter a great deal. The perceived dedication of group members check the not so focused students into place (that is very much the story of me). I was grumpy about commuting back and forth between San Francisco, until I met people came down from LA and Orange County, code in the day and seek housing in the evenings. Half of the class show up before 8AM, an hour before the class starts.

When you seriously start to rethink everything you do - is when someone who never programmed before came up with a great idea! It takes away all the pride and arrogance. At times, things get overwhelming, that's when you have to calm yourself and not let it get to you.

Programming is as much about the psychology and personality as the knowledge that you are acquiring. What stressed me out the most during the first week is that I don't have the programming personality. I had to come to terms with my short falls as well as my strength. Wow, it's crazy that it starts to be like a dojo.

Klout - impression - are you an influencer

Startup lifestyles in Silicon Valley:

The geek girls got together to see klout and the wonderful ladies who work there: from community manager, HR to operations and the front end back end developers.

Klout had us write down more than just the names on our name tags. What topics are you influential in? That is a great question. I wrote down Yelp, Codecademy, travel and Stanford. Everyone thought I worked at Yelp.

In case you don't know (my) Klout currently scores 5 social networks and renders one score that represent how influential an individual is within her social networks. And it was one of the first ones to do so, with many perks. Literally, you can receive freebies if your klout score is high enough.

Really, there isn't much down side to signing up. The female engineers at klout didn't have amazing scores, but they got all the geek girl SUPER excited. Working at the Javascript powerhouse, these are hand selected employees hired upon unanimous vote, a long interview process, and a lot of questions. Congratulations to their success! Everyone was super approachable.

As for how the score is determined, of course, that is the secret "recipe" of Klout. It is aiming to deliver more useful contents to users, not just judge them on their scores, after going through 3 rounds of front-end redesign and at least 3 rounds of back-end sort out of its Big Data processing.

Want to hear more about programming and startup lives in the Silicon Valley?

You can help by supporting my education here. I am striving to make more information available!

Crowdfunding

Programming Girl Battle Chest - throne : ergoergo

You link to Amazon ErgoErgo supports Programming Girl

This new ergoergo stool is now my throne of choice! Unlike a yoga ball (which didn't work for me :( I can now rock around and enjoy a minor core workout while keeping a healthy spine. I discovered these at the container store! So happy. After I started to learn programming, it was super hard to sit all day long. This does the trick for me.



[The above is a Amazon link, your purchase will help me with my programming quest. I can hence then keep this blog updated with the excitement of Silicon Valley. True to today, I just found this wonderful stool and I am using it :) If you want to request a picture of me :P comment!]

Codecademy now an essential tool for beginners

Did you know that Codecademy was down yesterday? It surely will be obvious if you are a beginner using the tool. A few girls at the Javascript study groups already told me that they weren't able to get their meeting going due to the outage.

A friend who tried a new tool was dissatisfied and quickly missed Codecademy. The funny thing was, she wasn't even a fan before. The outage (which unfortunately erased a few progress marks, and is currently being worked on by the Codecademy team for restoration) has somehow showed her just how important this tool is.

 Cheers to those yet to discover just how carefully designed the lessons are in this website. And one reason we loved it? It helped so many of us who didn't like reading tutorial books get started on coding. I still receive tweets on a daily basis about working moms, business practitioners, just everyday people learning how to code with Codecademy. Happy thoughts.

[Updated Feb 17]
For those affected by the outage, unfortunately some efforts are lost. As Codecademy does not charge a penny, and has gained quite a user base, it is hard for users like me to get mad beyond submitting a ranting support ticket. Codecademy supplied the apologies through multiple popups, but it wasn't enough, data was still lost. In the true spirit of #gamification - an element of the site - a 404 error badge was distributed to those affected! (super cute indeed) And it was promised that this will be a rare badge (reading between the lines : we are sorry and it won't happen very often, hence rare badge)

Anatomy of a Hackathon!

I am a geek girl making in progress (You may know me as that Codecademy Girl from Crunchies 2012 and the Venture Beat article about me. ). If you want to support my effort to learn coding please join me here and support my campaign, fundraising: http://www.gofundme.com/programminggirl

You can read about me on VentureBeat and the Crunchies award!
http://venturebeat.com/2013/02/06/codecademy-crunchies/

Currently there are 2 comments and 70+ twitter reactions.

With the support of my first two angel-referees, I attended my very first hackathon. Here's a diagram with it explained. Please note that this is only version one. I will keep updating this.

The grand conclusion is that there are totally beginner friendly hackathons, and it is a lot of fun, despite at times it may be intimidating to be with a roomful of experts.

• People take turns to go up and present their ideas/projects, can optionally form groups/tables
• Work on a group project, spontaneous project, or your very own
• Optional: at times there may be a beginner friendly table, join it to work on a tutorial, get help, ask questions, do whatever you want
• Keep in mind, every hackathon is different, some may have competitions, deadline, no beginner table, etc... I will post different versions of this diagram soon~
• Endless food/drinks. I learnt that unlike writing an essay, coding doesn't flow with alcohol. I quickly switched from one sip of beer to a doubleshot Starbucks. 

In my newsletter to angel-referee fund contributors, I will detailed my findings in newsletters~ The goal is to have something to share with the public but also some perks for the contributors that are exclusive.

Be an Angel or a Referee - help a girl learn how to code

I started a personal "kickstarter" fund to raise money for my programming education. If you are interested in hearing me out, and potentially donate/contribute a small amount to help a "fuzzy" girl learn coding. Please watch my "pitch" here :D
http://popcorn.webmadecontent.org/kpb

You can donate with the link below. So far I have raised $90 from three fund angels! One is a consultant,, one senior mobile app developer and another social network app developer. You help means a lot!

http://www.gofundme.com/programminggirl

The money is put into great use and for programming education only. Meanwhile, I will produce visual learning aids from my coding journey to help other learn.

Just this week, I went to my first hackathon ever, I am working on multiple programming courses (which cost money) and multiple free tutorials (use free resources whenever possible): Ruby, jQuery, HTML+CSS, Rails... I am on multiple coding projects concurrently.

One day I studied programming so much that my brain actually aches. Your support matters!

Today I put some first dollars into use to sign up for a $25 monthly subscription program for video tutorials. Meanwhile, I am sweating through multiple coursera and Youtube videos. It is getting hard pretty quickly! I am not just doing web design, but really web programming, so I need to get pretty technical, and start preparing for the intensive 9 week web development bootcamp that is coming right up!

In any case the first $25 is spend but if you sign up for Tree House too, you can learn programming through video tutorials, and that you can help me save money and also give yourself a huge discount by using my referral link. Here you go:





Thank you for helping a beginner programmer in need!

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