Three Weeks in the Wild

First and foremost, this should be considered payback for my dreadful IOU blog post a while back. Like the Lannisters, a Developer always pays her debts.

Freedom

I woke up on Saturday, with not only a slight headache (self inflicted & celebratory related), but also a bizarre sense of freedom. Not the kind that follows some sort of terrible captivation, but a new sense that felt like I’d just hit refresh on my life. I was unaware of what shape my life would be taking in the very imminent future but I was content none-the-less. I suspect this contentment was largely aided by the sleep in past 9 o'clock, something I hadn’t done in over nine weeks.

This freedom was largely short lived as the realities of nine-weeks of domestic TODOs came crashing down in one mighty blow. Not only had I put relationships on hold for this period, shopping supplies had dwindled to...

Week Nine at Enspiral Dev Academy

During this week I’ve experienced the full spectrum of emotions available to humans. That sounds exciting right? But think about it, that is an overwhelming amount to feel in such a condensed period of time, but I got the set. Luckily I had an arsenal of engineering empathy skills to fall back on and avoided going completely insane. The reasons for all the feels? It was final project week.

Subito

As I briefly mentioned in my terrible last blog post, I was fortunate enough to have my final project pitch idea selected as one of the three projects. I’ll talk a little through the process of how pitch day worked and how I came to be team-lead of Subito.

1. Pitches kick off
2. 10 minutes of Q&A between cohort members
3. Idea ranking by cohort (write your preferred three ideas to work on)
4. Coaches select project ideas and teams based on cohort preferences
5. Teams...

Week Eight at Enspiral Dev Academy

Week eight means one thing and one thing only; final projects commenced! In light of this and the fact that we have been averaging three-five hours sleep a night to transform an idea into reality this blog post is going to be a little bit rubbish (more like a lottle). In saying that I will make it up at a later date -promise.

Things you need to know:

1. My project idea got picked so I’m team lead for the project duration
2. It is “a real-time geolocational app that displays business deals of a limited lifetime”
3. It has a Rails backend
4. We use Google Maps API
5. I’m constantly amazed by the code me and my team are producing
6. You can find all Subito progress here!

Closing thoughts

There needs to be more time in the day…

Week Seven at Enspiral Dev Academy

I currently struggle to comprehend time, the concept of it I mean. A notion that used to be so black and white, so linear, so objective and now, well… Now time is fuzzy. The best way to illustrate it’s fuzziness is to state that this is my third time writing this opening paragraph. My first and second attempts looked like this:

1. I struggle to comprehend how quickly time seems to be going. Already I’m seven weeks through our nine week course. Cliches aside, it felt like only yesterday I was answering the famous four questions surrounded by equally anxious strangers. But this wasn’t yesterday. This was forty-seven yesterdays ago…

2. I struggle to comprehend how much time there is in the days at EDA. It’s only been seven weeks but it feels as though we are suspended in some inception like state that has really been a passage of a year. Yesterday feels a...

Week Six at Enspiral Dev Academy

Another day another $(document).ready and after only a week of JS we’ve moved onwards and upwards to APIs amongst other things. I’m tiring a little of never feeling like I’ve truly comprehended something before being thrust into the unbeknown of another tech topic. I suppose it’s just the nature of the beautiful beast that is EDA.

Application Programming Interface

You’ve heard of APIs before right? You know, those things that do the thing with the thing? This pretty much summed up my API knowledge prior to this week. I knew that the acronym existed, and I knew they were something techie but I didn’t understand their purpose in life.

In turns out they’re not as scary as I had first feared. No black magic, no millions of lines of code. So what are they? Well I’m glad you asked.

An API is simply a way for an application to share a part of itself with...

Week Five at Enspiral Dev Academy

Day 29 of EDA finally arrived and this was the start of the highly anticipated “JavaScript Week.” For more than a few of us, we had identified this as what we were most looking forward to in our time here at EDA, so it was safe to say expectations were high. I don’t know why I looked forward to it so much. I’m not saying that it wasn’t worthy of the anticipation, but I really knew nothing about JavaScript - just that it was currently the cool kid on the block and I suppose like others, I wanted in.

It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen

Well it was actually mid June, but as far as I can recall it may have been a sunny day. The clocks were striking 1.45pm, and more relevantly 8.45am. This was the start of JAVASCRIPT WEEK. Sorry for screaming, but looking forward to something is a really bizarre sensation for me. I...

Week Four at Enspiral Dev Academy

So it’s the end of week five and I’m writing my week four blog post. I think this is highly indicative of my time at EDA. Time is the scarcest commodity we have these days and I run to a strict interpersonal prioritizing regime. Unfortunately last week blogging fell very low in the hierarchy as I tried to grapple with more new concepts. That said I started this blogging thing so I’m going to see it out.

Phase Two

Week four coincided with the start of Phase Two, notorious as being the hardest of all the phases. I approached the week with mixed emotions; apprehension and anticipation. I knew that Phase Two was less about building foundations and more an introduction to the larger infrastructure we would be working with, along with a more realistic simulation of project scopes. Looking ahead at the weeks agenda there was our first two day project along...

Week Three at Enspiral Dev Academy

I did the Stuff quiz this morning scoring an abysmal three. Shouldn’t I have statistically done better than that just by choosing all “A”? I didn’t even know who the Crusaders played this weekend. How can I call myself a Cantabrian?

There was some restoration of my ego in not knowing Zac Effron’s High School Musical Characters name (Troy for anyone else in the dark). Finer details aside, the point I’m trying to make is the vast disconnect I now have with the world. I feel my poor performance in a current affairs (I use that term very leniently and mostly because I flat with a Fairfax employee) quiz very indicative of the fact I’m immersed in everything tech and have no time for anything else.

I knew what I was signing up for, but it’s extremely obvious now that I had never experienced anything so all encompassing to draw upon, so that my perceived...

Week Two at Enspiral Dev Academy

Two weeks down, and I can’t believe the pace at which I’m learning. Everyday so far has been new concepts building on the days’ prior. I’ve never been in such a ruthlessly progressive environment. EDA is incomparable to anything I’ve known and at times seems like a heightened, surreal version of my old life…

Ruby Recap

This week has been a bit of a mixed bag as far as topics covered. Monday was a recap of the week prior. I was pleased to find I had retained a large amount of the fundamentals, not always having syntax on immediate recall, but I know what to reference when I need it. This is one of the great things about EDA; it’s not all about rote learning. Instead, it’s about comprehension and the acceptance that we don’t need to know everything - we just need to know how to fill our knowledge gaps when necessary.

Although I feel my Ruby foundation...