Zero to Programmer in 16 weeks

This is what instructors at DBC wear on a daily basis

quotesforawesomeness — Wed, 15 Aug 2012 09:55:03 -0700

This is what instructors at DBC wear on a daily basis

"Technical job interviews want to find the end of your knowledge and then see how you figure things..."

quotesforawesomeness — Tue, 14 Aug 2012 10:34:04 -0700

“Technical job interviews want to find the end of your knowledge and then see how you figure things out from there.”

- Shereef Bishay

"How I explained REST to my wife"

quotesforawesomeness — Sun, 12 Aug 2012 22:27:48 -0700

triptagupta:

We learned about REST this week. The simplicity of Ryan Tomayko’s explanation in How I explained REST to my wife made me smile. I don’t know much about previously used distributed systems’ architecture like SOAP or WSDL, but would probably appreciate an explanation of each in Tomayko’s style.

A quick and accessible read. Kudos, Ryan!

We are hosting Startup Weekend at DBC this Sept. It’s...

quotesforawesomeness — Sat, 11 Aug 2012 15:59:00 -0700

We are hosting Startup Weekend at DBC this Sept. It’s going to crazy awesome. This was an idea I had envisioned right after getting accepted to the program. I had emailed Shereef to see what he thought about the idea. Little did I know he had actually WON a Startup Weekend last year and knew the main coordinator for the Bay Area region.

We got a hazy plan together and Shereef agreed to host Startup Weekend at the DBC offices if I managed it as him nor the staff didn’t have the bandwidth.

I said ‘yes’ and figured it would be no problem. Of course I didn’t calculate the I’d have zero time once school got under way. So planning has been much slower than I’d normally have liked, but we are in a good spot and about to really ramp up.

Already about 16 boots from Summer have signed up. Sponsors are joining and a ton more planning is about to happen once I have some time after class officially ends next week.

I can’t wait to see what everyone builds in 54 hrs.

Today

quotesforawesomeness — Fri, 10 Aug 2012 00:27:36 -0700

Today was a big day. A lot happened on many levels. But the biggest was that the decision about staying on as a TA at dev bootcamp has been finalized.

Originally I was 100% wanting to stay. I talked to Shereef and he was stongly leaning towards having me help for the next cohort. Then over the next few weeks I went back and forth with myself about the idea. Afted talking to teachers, teachers in training and TAs, I started to think I really wouldnt be learning much more rails or ruby if I stayed on. This week I was pretty much settled that it wasnt the best idea for me.

Then today Shereef told me that after talking, the staff felt like having TAs was not a good experience. For all the same reasons I had come up with.

I left our talk feeling very good that everyone was on the same page and up front about everything.

Then about 20 minutes later I realized Im not going to be at DBC soon. In a month or two this place wont be my home. Sure Ill always be welcome, but there is a very different quality to a space when its your full time thing. And very soon DBC wont be my full time thing.

And all of a sudden I got really sad. Actually, I almost started crying. Right.there on the couch with my laptop. Which is weird, becuase I dont really cry. But for about 5 min I thought I might.

I guess I just really hope I can find a place to work after DBC that feels as inviting and has a sense of meaning to totally draw me in.

We just took in in a million fucking dollars! Ok, its just in...

quotesforawesomeness — Thu, 09 Aug 2012 18:32:00 -0700

We just took in in a million fucking dollars!

Ok, its just in test mode, but so what. It’s pretty damn cool using the Stripe API

From now on you have to be bad ass to be at Dev Bootcamp. Or in...

quotesforawesomeness — Tue, 07 Aug 2012 18:07:44 -0700

From now on you have to be bad ass to be at Dev Bootcamp. Or in the matrix

Today we pitched ideas to work on for the last two weeks. About...

quotesforawesomeness — Mon, 06 Aug 2012 11:51:00 -0700

Today we pitched ideas to work on for the last two weeks.
About 30 ideas where put on the table. Then we had to figure out how we’d break into teams of 4.

It became super hard and everyone was yelling ideas at Shereef on how to decided. After a while of no one listening to him Shereef asked who thought they could do a better job of facilitating. Gavin jumped at the chance.

Basically it was the first time in 8 weeks that class turned into to total chaos. Gavin asked Dom to leave the room to which Dom gave his classic incredulous look and said “No.”

Then Dom took a turn at facilitating and got us pretty close to making it happen.

Shereef came back and we are now in the middle to working through it again.

I’ll say it was also one of the more fun moments because chaos is fun for limited periods.

Our team came up with a great idea and then killed it at Stripe...

quotesforawesomeness — Sat, 04 Aug 2012 18:20:00 -0700

Our team came up with a great idea and then killed it at Stripe today. And by killed it I mean, got confused a lot by javascript, needed help from Stripe employees and other participants, banged our head a lot and eventually get a token back from the Stripe servers. So basically nothing substantian to show by the end of the day. But we have an idea we want to pitch for.monday so this might continue on.

Boots at the Stripe mini hackathon today. We had a good showing...

quotesforawesomeness — Sat, 04 Aug 2012 18:15:12 -0700

Boots at the Stripe mini hackathon today. We had a good showing there. Its a pretty cool space. The cofounder John gave us some tips on using the api.

This is Gavin’s charger. I walked up to him and asked...

quotesforawesomeness — Sat, 04 Aug 2012 10:56:29 -0700

This is Gavin’s charger. I walked up to him and asked ‘why do you have my charger?’

He was puzzled for a moment and then put it all together.

The name ‘david’ means beloved, which is my name. Its actually David McDonald’s charger that he was using.

Me pitching at Startup Weekend on friday night. My team...

quotesforawesomeness — Fri, 03 Aug 2012 23:25:00 -0700

Me pitching at Startup Weekend on friday night.

My team eventually built Train Train. It’s for training on the train.
It’s built as a web app using Rails, but formatted for phones.

It was a great experience and it was cool to build a real working app in a day and a half. Ok really I did 10% of the coding and Peter did 90%, but whatever. I got to flex my coding muscles and it was great to have Peter take me seriously. We could have intelligent conversations and I understood what he was asking me to do.

Here is the working app: www.traintra.in

I’m heading up the organizing team for the Startup Weekend we are holding here at Dev Boot Camp in Sept. It should be pretty great. We just got DotCloud as a sponsor.

My biggest worry is that the price will keep too many of the current boots from siging up.
The normal price is $100. I’ve driven hard to bring the price down for the students. Currently it’s at $40 and I’m hoping to bring it down even further.

Me: “Gavin, check your email” Gavin: “No! No, I can’t do that!”

quotesforawesomeness — Fri, 03 Aug 2012 23:13:33 -0700

Me: “Gavin, check your email”

Gavin: “No! No, I can’t do that!”

Friday night at DBC. Apparently we all like being here even on a...

quotesforawesomeness — Fri, 03 Aug 2012 20:23:54 -0700

Friday night at DBC. Apparently we all like being here even on a friday night.

Jesse getting into the champange Doms parents brought

quotesforawesomeness — Fri, 03 Aug 2012 18:24:00 -0700

Jesse getting into the champange Doms parents brought

Gavin playing the Sax on the fire escape. Its pretty romantic if...

quotesforawesomeness — Fri, 03 Aug 2012 18:21:56 -0700

Gavin playing the Sax on the fire escape. Its pretty romantic if you ask me.

Dom’s birthday. He was mad at Shereef for making him come...

quotesforawesomeness — Fri, 03 Aug 2012 18:05:30 -0700

Dom’s birthday. He was mad at Shereef for making him come up to the front. So he opened up Shereefs broweser history on the big screen as revenge.

Behavior Driven Development part 2

quotesforawesomeness — Fri, 03 Aug 2012 17:24:00 -0700

BDD.

Shereef gave another breakout session on BDD, Capybara and rspec.

It’s basically an higher level of testing than Test Driven Development. It’s also done from the perspective of the browser and and not the model.

We are testing what the browser sees and what it can do. Such as filling in text boxes, clicking on buttons and seeing new pages show up.

With BDD we have a large over arching integration tests that turns red in the beginning. Then we use smaller unit tests to check smaller pieces of code. Each of these unit tests we work toward turning green one by one until the larger integration test turns green.

Michael giving a breakout session on AJAX and...

quotesforawesomeness — Fri, 03 Aug 2012 14:14:00 -0700

Michael giving a breakout session on AJAX and JQuery.

http://api.jquery.com/radio-selector/

I’m kinda lost, but thats normal. Just trying to get the first 30% Shereef keeps telling us to get each time.

Tanner teaching ajax and jquery. Today we are going back to our...

quotesforawesomeness — Fri, 03 Aug 2012 11:03:00 -0700

Tanner teaching ajax and jquery.

Today we are going back to our BaseCamp clone adding ajax to it. I’m excited to see Tanner’s work as he’s helped me a lot one on one over the weeks. He’s one of my ‘go-to’ guys here.