First though's (not literally) about DBC

Tuesday May 20, 2015

From everything I've seen, heard, read, and researched, the DBC experience is not to be underestimated. What I took away from the Kitchen talk with Shereef was realizing that, from the moment I started watching the video, and since I had started the phase-0-unit-1/week-1 work , I was in the restaurant mindset.I was in a position of expecting something because I paid for it. I agreed whole heartedly that falling into that idealism was easy and automatic, and trainned. However what knowledge did was encourage me to, at that very moment, switch out of that mindset. I hate to say this because I know how it might be taken, but listening to Shereef as he spoke about those different mindset, almost felt like I was "drinking the Koolade", at a cult. I was an instant believer in making this journey my own. I wan to get the most out of this experience and for me that means talking control and responsibility for my own learning.

Version Control, Git, and GitHub

Tuesday May 19, 2015

setup

Do you remember highschool group projects? Do you remember the difficulty in getting your group together and on the same page. Well if you work in tech these days or if you are the lead organizer for any kind of group, you will find that those highschool dilemma's are still plaguing your life. The problem has always been finding time and gathering the right tools to make a group successful. Enter Version Control, Git, and Github.

Thinking outside of the box

Monday May 25, 2015

Did you know that on a webpage everything is a box? It's true! Every div, every table, every paragraph, everything! They are all boxes. They have a height and a width. Not only this but everything on a webpage has a natural postion by default. This is called it's static postion. That means that when you create a paragraph or any other html markdown object, it has a natural position on the webpage.
So why does this matter?
Well in the field of website design placement of objects is crucial to site usuablity, that is why most often you will find navigation links either at the top or at the left of a web page, or why copyright information is most oftern at the bottom of a webpage. These things are not often by choose, but by convention. or rather by user preferences that have become conventions.

Hashes... that good good!

Wednesday June 3, 2015

Now i know what your thinking : But isn't a hash just an array. Sorry that is incorrect. well at least in ruby. In ruby a hashes is an associative array instead of being indexed like the normal array.
here is an example of a normal array:

variable1 = [100, 'two', 'knife' 'cheeseburger' ]

now here is an example of a hash:

variable2 = {"name" => "Sally", "number" => 42, "sports" => ["basketball", "baseball", "Hockey"] }

thinking styles

Friday June 5, 2015

My expience in phase 0:
Up to this point my experience has been comforting, I understand the material and I am able to build relationships with people I've never meet face to face. both these experiences have been contrary to my initail fears in joining the program. My biggest struggle is time management. Even though I am getting the work done on time I feel like I am not managing that time efficiently. I feel I could do more. This struggle is definitely do to my learning style. I am a Concrete Random learner and rules and regulations are not something I like. Well I like to break them. My strategy for managing my time going forward will be to turn it into a game, since I like games. This game will be in the vien of SuperBetter and with the help of my fellow boots it will become a daily habit for me.

I wish I had a map

Tuesday June 9, 2015

sometimes in code you want to do a task repeatedly to a set object and get something different then what was put in. For example say we had an application that sent out thank you emails to all our feed subscriber. Now imagine the case where you have an extremely popular feed. It would probably take you days if not weeks to send all those emails, not to mention if you wanted to customize those message even just a little bit. The solution to this kind of problem is map. Map allows you to run a block of code repeatedly on an object usually an array. Those of you who have used ruby before will undoubtly inquiry on the difference between map vs each. While at the surface it may seem like map and each do the same thing, there is a subtle but important difference. using map returns the contents of the object it is called on changing the objects in place, while each only return the same object it was called on.

Designing for Accessibility

Wednesday June 10, 2015

First off let me say that this subject doesn't get nearly enough attention. I hold no false hopes that this post will inspire designer, developers, and would be technoligist, to take up arms and fight for this cause. This is truly and absolutely a social issue.

As an American society we put less value on the lives of the less able. So it's no superise that the technology we create puts the disabled at a further and further disadvantage. This post is not for society at large and to be honest if you don't believe that there is a problem then nothing you read will ever change your mind. However for those of you who have seen the disadvantage and divide, for you would be designer and technologist, I have a story for you.

feedmeback

Monday Jun 15, 2015

Pairing

Pair is an experience. it's always different and so far, no matter how many times I do it. It doesn't seem to get any less stressful. The inner voice is always there. Telling me that I probably don't know enough to be a good pair. But that is also the beauty of pair. I do learn something every time. I find something that my peer is doing well and I ask myself if I am doing that thing as well, or if could be doing it better. The most rewarding part of peer pairing is of course the relationship you build in the process. Not second to this is the admiration you tend to find do to the empathy you receive from the process. I find that perhaps the most frustrating part of peer pairing is usually the first 5-10 minutes...

Modeling a motorcycle

Monday Jun 15, 2015

Classes in programming represent real world objects. the best place to use a class is when you anticipate repeatedly make a certain object. For example lets image that we want to create a program which creates motorcycle. Assuming that our program already has knowledge of a vehicle class, which covers having wheels and steering and traveling we can focus on the particulars of a motorcycle. our class may look something like this:

Stereotype threat

Monday Jun 22, 2015

Imagine you are in a office filled with people of the opposite sex and you are tasked with giving a speech about gender equality in the workplace. If you are imagining correctly then I have no doubt that you are feeling uncomfortable. Stereotype threat is that uncomfortableness. Stereotype threat is the experience of being in a situation or doing something for which a negative stereotype about one of your identities is relevant. In this situation your gender is one of your identities and it may seem very relevant. what makes the stacks even higher is imagining that a promotion you have been waiting for is riding on this speech.

Lambda, Lambda, Lambda

Tuesday June 23, 2015

Desipte the title, this post is not about the movie Revenge of the nerds, it's not about Half-life and it has almost nothing to do with the 11th letter in the greek alphabet with numerical value is 30 for those things google has you covered. This is about the programming object Lambda. A lambda is a Proc, and a Proc is a Block but even though one thing is another it doesn't mean they are all the same thing.

TL:DR; Rails is an application built for Ruby developers in order to expediate the process of building web applications and websites. The way rails does this is by establishing convention. Essentailly when you start to build a project in rails you get a lot of stuff for free. Stuff like routes, which sets up communication between files, you get ActiveRecord, you get scaffolding, you get generate, you get gemfile, and database options and much more. Rails enforces MVC and breaks down your projects with that paradigm in mind. Rails also comes with a local webserver so that you can test your project as you build it.

if you asked me today to break down the conflict into psuedocode this is what I would say:

girlfriend want to be closest person to me. - wants love
her hearing things second hand or after the fact hurts her - feels hurt
openness is a problem for me in general (it's not personal) - doesn't trust
girlfriend takes it personally - feels untrusted
need to convince her to not take it personally - wants understanding
--or--
I must leave. - needs distance

The best app you never new existed

thank you interwebs

Do you ever wish you could download that amazing youtube video you just discovered? Well guess what you're about 9 years behind the curve there. Not to insult you late adopters but the ablitilty to download youtube video's and music has been avaliable since 2006. That being said it really didn't gain mainstream recognition until 2011.
It's call youtube-dl and it's a command line application. Despite the name this little program doesn't only work with youtube, there are well over six hundered support urls from which to download content. here is how it works:

Atom and things

Mon Jun 29, 2015

I've been trying to use Atom as my defacto text editor for the past few days and I found a few things I thought I'd share with you. If you are considering switching text editors (which if you are reading this you are), then I can recommend Atom 1.0. For one thing the version control support is on point. If you make a change to a file that is already tracked by git then Atom gives you an indication of whether that change has been saved, staged, or commited. This is done by color coding the file(s) in question.

green : for changes staged
orange: for saved but unstaged changes
black: for commited changes