Month: March 2015

Am I Brainwashed? A Responce to Seth Godin’s Manifesto

hhassan2015thecoder Flatiron Web Development

I was fooled. Fooled into being average and thinking that is ok. I have been brainwashed by society. Just because society doesn’t have room for a million Steve Jobs that think differently. If you remember your mother telling you that you are special, but when you go to school you are grouped in generalized and creativity sterilized. Seth Godin’s book, Linchpin: Are You Indispensable talks about the problem of being a individual in a public educational system that is made to have everyone exiting thinking and acting the same.

What does Seth mean by the title brainwashed? Are you brainwashed?

What I understand from Godin’s ideas of being brainwashed is that we have been programed to become cogs in the machine of society and not to be unique.

What is the function of public education?

What I believe public education’s purpose is, is to give every child the common knowledge to function in society. Now, if these students are good enough they go on to college majoring in something that they are interested in and become more of a individual from there. What has happen now is that everyone needs to have a college degree in order to have a typical job so college has turned into another form of public education in which they are standardized and no one is rewarded for being a individual.

What is art?
Is that act of coming to the Flatiron school your art? Or are you looking for us to draw you a map?

I believe art is any product one has put a ton of labor and passion in; something one would like to share with the world. Art can be anything, a well personalized work desk or even one’s code. I feel as though what I have created in this program my art, not the act of coming to the school.

Why are you here?

I am here at the Flatiron School because I want to learn how to program, but I could not afford nor wanted to go through a formal education. I want to be great and creative in the work world and I feel as though I cannot do that at any position besides coding in this day and age.

What is the resistance?
What does failure mean? How is failure at Flatiron different than what you are used to?

My resistance within this program is just learning enough to become a great coder. Failure for me is not being good enough for a particular field. Failure at Flatiron for me would be soul crushing it is something that would make me a dark sadder failure in life. This is why at this moment The Flatiron School is my life at this moment.

Advertisements

A Talk With a Flatiron Alum

hhassan2015thecoder Flatiron Web Development ,

I spoke with my Flatiron School mentor on Monday and it was truly an eye opening experience. My mentor’s name is Daniel Spector. He went from working as an accountant to becoming a coder from the Flatiron School.  He now works at Lifebooker, a company which is basically a Groupon for beauty deals. I did not know what to think of a mentor meeting so I was a nerd and created questions for the occasion.

My first question was what was his coding background before Flatiron Daniel had zero coding experience all he did was a little HTML for his job. He did went to a lot of meet ups like the NYC.rb meets ups to learn about coding. He actually off handedly mentioned that he got his job offer from Lifebooker from a connection he met a the meet up, so go to meet ups.

I then proceeded to ask him what were the first could of days like at his job and his response was very eye opening! Apparently, at most junior developer positions you actually are not expected to know anything for the first couple of months. naturally I can understand this from starting new positions in my life but the entry level buffer for positions I been a part of have been around two to three weeks to get on board with the program or get out. In school we learn simply complexity with our one hundred to one thousand line applications. In companies, one would be working with programs with million lines of code and that would take some time to learn and get use to.

At that point in the talk, I asked generally basic questions about his job and the tech field, but I then turned it to a serious topic for a moment and asked him about his experience with diversity in the tech field. naturally I knew the answer. We need more multiracial eyes, thought, and code in tech but I wanted to see what he wold say about the matter. He got a bit more serious and uncomfortable  and talked about sure hoping for a difference because it is needed.

I then asked him about his future aspirations in the world of coding and he answered with the hopes of becoming a senior designer one day and basically told me that I should do the same once I am in a position. He does a lot of side learning outside of the job and basically does this first because one should never stop learning as a programmer, but he also constantly learns because he knows that the more he learns the faster he will reach the goal of being a senior developer. I really resonate with this thought process because this is how a ambitious coder should behave especially if they are a minority in their field.

So then I asked him for advice, he just said don’t freakout. He freaked out a ton coming into the program with no experience freaked out when it came to finding a job and he wish some one told him to not freakout he would get it, he would get a job and etc. so he just told me to not freakout.

I can’t wait to meet with again. I will be meeting him before he heads off to present at Ruby Con in April about Javascript with Ruby.

So…. I know that was not too technical so I will give you my method of the week!!!

This week it goes to… Partiton string method!

The Partition method splits a string into an array based on where you set the argument.

partition(sep) → [head, sep, tail]
partition(regexp) → [head, match, tail]

Searches sep or pattern (regexp) in the string and returns the part before it, the match, and the part after it. If it is not found, returns two empty strings and str.

"hello".partition("l")         #=> ["he", "l", "lo"]
"hello".partition("x")         #=> ["hello", "", ""]
"hello".partition(/.l/)        #=> ["h", "el", "lo"]

Using the Ruby Doc’s from a Developer

hhassan2015thecoder Flatiron Web Development

Since my Flatiron experience has started I have been learning a ton of ways to be a better programmer. I have learned flow charts from Mykle, I have learned ways to name variables to not have to deal with commenting your code heavily, and just other ways to be a great developer.

I have just finished my third tutoring session with my Technical tutor Joe. We meet every Saturday at 1PM and he dropped some knowledge on me. He has helped me with the labs of Green Grocer, CLI Application,  and Object Oriented -Robot. What I am trying to pick up from him is healthy habits in becoming a effective developer and one of the ways I learned how to become a better developer from him his a effective way to look through the Ruby Documentation. I have always suffered through my dealings with the Ruby Docs and I have been always looking to learned a new way to go through the Docs for my answers.

Methods

He told me about a interesting way of working through the Ruby-Docs. Joe would got through the Ruby Documentations when he has a problem or is looking for a method he would go through the method and without reading the method create a new tab and continue looking for another method that sounds like it could solve his problem based on the sound of it.  Do this for about three to four solutions. Then look through each tab and look to see if any of them would be a good solution. What I enjoy about this process is the fact that you are not going back and forward through the ruby docs and chances are one of those selections would solve your problem not in the most conventional way but it would bring you closer to your solution.

values_at(selector, …) → new_ary

Returns an array containing the elements in self corresponding to the givenselector(s).

The selectors may be either integer indices or ranges.

See also #select.

a = %w{ a b c d e f }
a.values_at(1, 3, 5)          # => ["b", "d", "f"]
a.values_at(1, 3, 5, 7)       # => ["b", "d", "f", nil]
a.values_at(-1, -2, -2, -7)   # => ["f", "e", "e", nil]
a.values_at(4..6, 3...6)      # => ["e", "f", nil, "d", "e", "f"]

I used this process to solve Monday’s Lab of my-delete. What we had to create a couple of method that would delete elements out of a array. so what I did was look through the Ruby Docs and found three possible solutions. my major problem was finding the indexes of the elements I’d like to find in an array so that was my first set and the rest would come easy. I happen upon my last possible solution values_at that took an argument and stores it in an array. now I didn’t want a values in a array but I could work with this data. I was able to take the elements from the array and which were the indexes of the argument I wanted to delete.

In conclusion, learned healthy habits from other developers is a great way to speed up your productivity, teach yourself a little bit better, and just be a all around better programmer. I’ve learned flow charts from Mkyle, short cut keys from Katie along other things and Ruby Docing from Joe.