The week after graduation I got a call from the temp agency I use to work for and spent the next month working as a data entry clerk in Gilroy and San Jose. It was great to be back to work and taking a break from all those lines of code but I knew that I still needed to attend residency and work on the job hunt so I spoke to the instructors about delaying residency until the next month, in December, and they were fine. I still came in from time to time to use the office space to get some work done. I also joined a gym to get back in shape after three months of sitting in front of computer screens and stuffing myself with protein bars.
December came around, I finished my temp work, and I was back in the Dojo. For residency the instructor wanted me to work on at least three projects since that amount of work will often gain students notice for jobs. After much thought I thought about doing the following:
- Treedentity - In the Fall of 2014 I took a class in college that was centered around applying technology for the community. The team I was with was tasked with designing a tree-leaf identification site for a middle school in Cupertino. I was the main developer for this project and without any knowledge of frameworks and libraries much of the code was written in manually, resulting in a rigid site with content that didn't change with the device it was being seen in. After this bootcamp I went back to the code, cleaned it up a lot, applied Bootstrap and the MEAN stack to make it into a single-page application that was more fluid and changed depending on the device it was seen in. Final code is on GitHub.
- Paper Crane Translations - Do you remember my German friend starting up his own business and asking me to design the website for it? Since the site was very simple and didn't require any back-end I figured it would be easier to do the entire site as a single-page application, henceforth used the MEAN stack. My German friend wasn't always available to give me his inputs so I used my spare time to create the logo and background images for the site. By the time he finally got back to me and gave me his inputs the site was ready for deployment. Today you can find it under www.papercranetranslations.com.
- Graffiti - My first two projects were easy and was not the best use of everything I learned at the Dojo. The instructor reminded me of that and encouraged me to pursue a more challenging project. The main bulk of Coding Dojo's curriculum focused on CRUD designs (create, read, update, destroy). Sites that allow users to make posts, update them, show them off to other users, and delete them if necessary are CRUD sites. Think about social media sites like Facebook or Twitter. So I decided to make my own social media site called Graffiti (you can write on the "wall" like graffiti) and using Ruby on Rails. I tried initially to do it on MEAN since I am very accustomed to it but after a week of solving one problem after another I realized that MEAN is not built for something of that magnitude. MEAN is centered around single-page sites and in social media sites often involve changing pages when users log in/out or visit static pages. After about two weeks of working on that project I deployed something basic. Check this out. It's not complete and there are a lot of bugs that I am unable to work out but I felt like a learned a lot more about Rails and how to implement complex designs. I also learned that it is important to work with others since sites like Facebook are so big and complicated that one developer cannot hope to understand every single detail on their own.
Also, you might have noticed that I used the word "deploy". Up until residency I had no idea how to deploy sites after completing them. It wasn't until I got around to Graffiti that I was forced to figure that part out. It took a whole day to get it up online but once I did it became easy for Paper Crane Translations, which really pleased my German friend. I used Amazon Web Services for both cases and for the domain name I used Godaddy.
I wish I could go into more detail about that and what else has happened since December but one of my college friends has asked me to help him out so I have to go and meet him. I have a lot more to say and perhaps it would be better to split this into two entries.
Thanks for sticking around.
