I'm at the half-way point of my intense JavaScript program. In week six we did some more work with the sequelize ORM and used meteor to make a basic clone of Stack Overflow. On the first day of break I went to Heroku's Waza conference and it was great. I got the T-shirt I'm wearing in the video and a prototype of one of the speakers' table-top games! Some people gave me good feedback on RoboDuel (demoed in the previous video). I've got three topics I'm considering for my personal project to work on during this break. As usual, feedback is welcome!
Plans for the next nine days
Tomorrow is my last day of class at Hack Reactor before the break starts. I'm absolutely exhausted. There are so many things to do and so many things to learn, that I've decided to list them:
- Contribute to an open source project
- If I can get some time with our instructor, get started working on his project, bound.js
- Do some contract work for a friend of a friend who recently got in touch with me
- Improve my RoboDuel game
- Work through more of the programming language design course at Nathan's University
- Clean up a couple of things on Toshuo
- Meet up with a couple of cool people I've recently met at meetups
- SLEEP
I'm especially looking forward to that last one.
Hack Reactor Diaries #3 – RoboDuel with Backbone and CoffeeScript
This week we had a two day make-up cycle in which we could work on whatever we wanted. I used it to make a prototype of a programmable robot fighting game! In the course of doing so, I got to do some more work with Backbone.js and CoffeeScript. It was a lot of fun, too! I plan to work on it some more when I have a chance and I'd love your feedback on it. Gameplay starts 4m20s into the video.
Hack Reactor Diaries #2
This is an archive of some of my thoughts after completing the first two weeks of Hack Reactor. When I filmed it, I wasn’t sure if I’d ever share it or not, but I’ve decided to go the open route. Warning: it’s not edited and it’s full of uhms and pauses.
Hack Reactor Diaries #1
This is an archive of some of my thoughts after completing the first two weeks of Hack Reactor. When I filmed it, I wasn't sure if I'd ever share it or not, but I've decided to go the open route. Warning: it's not edited and it's full of uhms and pauses.
A recursive algorithm for generating all N-Rooks solutions and a linear time N-Queens solution
Below is my interactive implementation of the famous N-Rooks and N-Queens problem. If you're on a feed reader or have disabled for JavaScript some reason, you're missing the main feature of this page! Click below on the board to add and remove pieces. The board indicates threatened pieces. Checking 'All' solutions for rooks shows a random solution and logs them all into the JS console.
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My classmates rocked it at both Meteor bootcamp and the other hackathon
Awesome! We're moving to a new office on Market Streen, right by the Westfield Mall! And of the 3 Hack Reactor teams at the Hackathon, all made the final 16, 2 made the final 6 and one is still in contention to win the whole thing!
Re-writing Underscore.js
We spent the last couple of days of week 2 at Hack Reactor re-implementing underscore.js functions. It may seem like an odd and useless exercise, but I feel I've gotten some good things out of it.
How to implement a hash table
I've known for a long time that hash tables (aka "hash maps" or "dictionaries") were data structures for storing key/value pairs. A perfect example of this is a dictionary.
How Code School helped prepare me for Hack Reactor
I've just finished my first week of Hack Reactor, an intense program even in comparison to the other hacker schools. Our class runs from 9am to 8pm six days a week, but in honesty I was there until 11pm on most nights and I was never the last student to go. The students in our class come from a mix of backgrounds. Some have done CS degrees and others had virtually no technical background at all before getting in. In this week, we've learned how to use Jasmine for automated testing, we've slung jQuery to make front-end Twitter clones, we've implemented linked lists, queues, stacks, trees and hash tables, and meditated upon many JS koans. One thing that really helped make it possible was that the instructors signed us up for accounts at Code School and gave us some prep work to do before the first day of class.