Q&A Choosing Web Development Bootcamp [VIDEO]

LoroCard is now open source!

Getting started on Front End design or development?
Check out my Project LoroCard. Its code is now fully on GitHub. Feel free to use it to practice GitHub as well: git clone your own copy, pulling, reporting issues and submitting questions.

This project is pure front-end. You can pull the entire source code!

:) enjoy

http://lorocard.com/

https://github.com/theoptips/lorocard

A Happy Dosage of Sheryl Sandberg for Aspiring Girl Coders and Businesswomen

Lean In the book by Sheryl Sandberg

Her life isn't all privileged. She had to fight, adapt and learn, and stand up again too.

"chapters after chapters of advice and studies" - CNN

Levo League live office hour with Sheryl Sandberg

Also a great resource for aspiring ladies

http://www.levoleague.com/office-hours/sheryl-sandberg

Sheryl Sandberg explains Lean In briefly on CNN

Too busy to read, or thinking Sheryl's too lofty to everyday women?

http://www.cnn.com/2013/03/18/opinion/sandberg-take-risks/index.html

Sheryl Sandberg at my college back in the days - Stanford

Relentlessly Pleasant and other studies, tips about how to be a successful woman

Bizarre Jokes and Memes that go along with coding? Finding Nemo is one.

The Struggle of Struggles - A Confession of A Noob

Coding Dojo - our bootcamp has an annoying motto : struggle to learn. It is hard to agree to, because in turn, we suffer through struggling. But it is hard not to concur, because we learn so much in that struggle.

Half a year ago, Ruby on Rails seems to be magical. rails g, rake db:migrate, git push, git push heroku... voila your app is ready! And it is awesome, it looks like Twitter without the tags, and everything works! Feel free to view post edit delete... wow congrats you just said the fanciest Hello World with a full blown web app. Who cares about Michael Hartl's tutorial? This thing just works. I am now a RoR developer, except... NOT.

The moment to customize and build on top of the app began... all of a sudden, motion freezes: the magic turns into suffering. What happened? What do I do? What the heck is MVC, rspec, css.css, html.erb, rake here rake there... okay, i hate ruby and as well as Rails now, because they are so zen that my head hurts.

Our "sensei" made us suffer HTML CSS jQuery Ajax PHP all the fundamentals, Object Oriented Programming OOP, CodeIgniter, Object Relational Mapping ORM... basically lots lots of tedious suffering later: finally Ruby... okay finally one week later Rails. After building three full blown Heroku deployed Rails app and unfinished console game, and lots of Rails talk later. I am really really starting to understand Rails on a deep level. It's hard to describe but you just know.

I am still going slowly, very slowly, and I want to see all the knots and bolts of Rails, why was it designed that way, why Ruby, why does everyone like Ruby... and that's when I realized how deep Rails can really go. And there I was beaming while writing StaticPages controller. Yes, WTF? So many apps later, I am beaming on some freaking StaticPages controller? oh yes, love it, love that I understand the rspec, the console command lines, the history of vi and vim... and yes I wrote some instance variables too to be passed to views... but gosh it feels so good to really understand how instructional it is to generate a static page backwards using Rspec Green Red Refactor method and know that I can just add my variables any time.

Finally, I am *starting* to understand Rails - a confession of a beginner.

Lean In Chapter 1 admitting the ambition

Chapter by Chapter Reaction to

Sheryl Sandberg's Lean In

Posting a blog post about reading Sheryl's Lean In is actually ... admitting that I want to be an ambitious, successful, boardroom squatting woman! Gasp, us women simply don't do that. Sheryl's is saying we actually have to fight for better rights, the progress has simply stalled.

Standing on the shoulder of giants?

My high school classmate Lucy has led the feminist club, rallied ladies and guys to vocalize the demand for equality. I heard great names like Virginia Woolf, but I had no idea what she was about? Something about anonymous female authors, something about universal suffragettes .. all the concepts and people blend together. Okay, I fail as a feminist, and I never thought myself as one. Because being a feminist is saying more than demand equality. It is actually more extreme, it demands more in light of all the unfairness that women have suffered. To defend the victims, we almost have to over compensate and say that women are better. But of course, all concepts need to be more mellow and friendly, as well as accepting to have mass appeal, and may be then, the concept of women being better and being leaders have mellowed down...

Sheryl Sandberg is saying fighting is needed though. And that is true feminism. If we don't fight for better lives for women, better compensation, leadership opportunities, the progress will be stalled further, and all who is not doing that, is just enjoying a free ride - riding on the shoulder of giants trying to reach the sky. 

The sky does not just come down and meet up. 

Sigh and thrill, I just realized that the time is different. This is the exciting times of being a woman, being a woman in the tech world, being a woman learning how to code. Oh gosh, what shall I do? I can tell something exciting is happening, like Katy Perry's Firework song makes crackles, makes you want to jump, shine and then burst. 

Love it, as I dig deeper in technology, I have discovered a great read - the modern feminist manifesto by a business lady. She might cause controversial because her background is unusual, privileged, and powerful, but hey, I am so glad that she got me thinking, ticking, and now becoming unrested.


 --- Below is a video by Levo League, Caroline Ghosn is a co-founder, and she is a Stanford alumna <3 flowers for her.  ---

The Big Move

The new class at Coding Dojo is starting tomorrow on Monday. The current class has about 3 weeks overlap, and we are moving downstairs leaving the upstair, brighter and better office space for the new class. I don't think I like the chemical smell of new furniture very much, but I haven't made up my mind about this overlap.

Will we get enough attention, help, support? How is the staff time going to be divided between the classes? It certain is doable and somewhat reasonable to have this overlap, but definitely some unease too. 

I did sign up for some TA sessions, to help the new class with topics that are very interesting to me PHP MySQL. I actually would like to help with other parts too but it is too close to demo day. HTML, CSS, jQuery are areas of interest to me too. 

So much of learning how to code in a bootcamp is not about the coding. It is really about all the parts that come along as a package. It is about the commute, dividing time among family & friends, learning, dealing with life... it's never just about coding. That is why this is a big commitment, and sort of a life adventure / milestone. We will see how things turn out.