Blog Archives

May 06 2013

Hack Reactor Week 1 in Review

Week number one at Hack Reactor is over, I had my first day off since moving to SF, and we’re back at it for week 2. The pace this first week was crazy, and I can’t believe how much material we covered in such a short amount of time. I found myself getting home most nights about 11pm this week, simply because there was so much material to digest and work out in my code.

I also finally got my bike shipped out to me, which has been so much better than taking public transportation everywhere. My ride to school in the morning is about 5 miles, and I have been able to find a route that has as few hills as possible because it’s a single speed bike. Getting some exercise in the morning really gets me brain working correctly for the day, and I’ve been much more alert since starting that routine.

new-loki-cycles-bike

After re-building our pre-course assignments, we dove head first into quite a few basic computer science lessons and how to implement them in JavaScript. We also had a guest talk from a former senior team lead  at Facebook, and I attended my first JavaScript meetup. Here is a run-down of the major topics we covered in just the first 6 days:

  • Git workflow and command line
  • JavaScript basics like functions, methods, callbacks, closures, objects and scope
  • Recursion and as an example we re-built the getElementByClassName native JS function
  • The debugger command and the process of finding errors with Chrome dev tools and the console
  • JavaScript prototype chains
  • jQuery basics – used to make a simple Twitter clone
  • JavaScript classes and shared methods with functional, functional shared, prototypal, and pseudoclassical instantiation
  • Test Driven Development with Jasmine and Mocha
  • Object Oriented Programming: isolation, modularity, loose coupling, makers, mixins, subclassing, etc.
  • JavaScript event systems
  • Data Structures: hash tables, linked lists, trees, binary trees, sets, and big O notation

Wow, that is a ton of material now that I have it all together in one place. We implemented all of these bullet points in different sprints and projects this first week. I just hope I can retain it all in the weeks to come.

We also got to see the personal project presentations of all the students in the senior class, which is 6 weeks ahead of us in the Hack Reactor course work. Some of the web apps that were presented were very impressive, and I can’t wait to start applying some of my new knowledge to a project of my own. There seemed to be a few students that tried to tackle a project that was too ambitious for the time they had to work on it, and as a result we had to sit through presentations of projects with limited or incomplete functionality. I talked with a few of the senior students and they stressed the importance of limiting the scope of your project to start, then adding more features as time permits. Seems like a good engineering code to live by, in general.

Some resources I came across this week:
Coderbyte – small JavaScript problems with timers and scoring to practice your skills. A lot of fun and a good boost when you some a problem quickly.
HTML5 Conference Slide Decks – One of the presenters at the meetup this week, Dan Lynch, has his deck here, but it looks like tons of interesting content. I want to check it out when I have more time.
Fancy.js – A mashup of underscore.js and functional.js. Love the poker-themed demo.

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Apr 12 2013

Hack Reactor Prep Work

I spent the last few days visiting San Francisco to check out Hack Reactor in person, and to secure housing for the next three months. I was able to find a great place to live bordering the Presidio Park in Richmond, which should be a fairly easy bike ride downtown to Union Square and Hack Reactor. I also met a few of the Hack Reactor instructors in person. Marcus took the time to work with me one-on-one to answer some questions I had about the prep work, which was super cool of him to do.

The prep work for Hack Reactor is designed to bring all of the students up to speed on some building block topics we will be covering during our first week. It is designed to be completed over 2 weeks, with Skype check-ins along the way to monitor our progress and help us out with sections where we may be stuck. Over these weeks I easily spent 100 hours on research, online tutorials, and writing the code for each section. The three main projects are to be submitted via a GitHub pull request so that the instructors can go over our code with us.

The first major component of the prep work included an introduction to Git, the version control software used in most professional environments. It allows engineers to work on separate sections of the same code base at the same time, and then merge their changes together without conflicts (hopefully). I worked through a number of online tutorials, the most helpful of which was the Git Real course on Code School. This course really cemented in what Git was, and how to use it.

Next up was re-building the popular underscore.js library components using JavaScript. I learned about all kinds of basic JS programming structures like loops, functions, callbacks, arguments, and conditional statements. This was the section I most struggled with because some of the underscore components are quite tricky. If you’re not familiar with underscore.js, go check it out and run through the wiki. I guarantee it will save you tons of time versus writing these building-block components from scratch.

The next major component of the prep work was building a more advanced version of the Twitter clone I built for my entrance exam. This one is called Twittler, and it required quite a bit of jQuery DOM manipulation. I completed both of the Code School jQuery courses to become more familiar with how to use selectors, animations, and DOM insertion/deletion. You can check out the my final version of Twittler online, which uses randomly generated tweets from a javascript function.

The third component was a basic computer science module where we learned about recursion and how to use it in JavaScript. Once I wrapped my brain around what was involved with recursion, the actual assignment did not take too much time to complete. However, there is still much to learn about this topic and how to leverage it in more powerful ways.

I just got back to Utah, but I’m looking forward to being in SF next week!

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