Tag Archives: Hack Reactor

Hack Reactor Review—life at a hacker school

Many prospective students have been emailing me and asking about how various programming boot camps compare. How does Dev Bootcamp compare to Hack Reactor? Where can I find an App Academy review? Should I consider doing Hack Reactor instead of a four year degree at Stanford or Berkeley? Most of all I've been asked, "What happened after you finished the program? Could you find a job?"

I'm happy to say that Hack Reactor exceeded my expectations in pretty much every way possible. I learned far more than I ever expected and it was the most intense twelve weeks of my life (Except maybe that time I started a business with no capital in a foreign country).

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Hack Reactor Diaries #5 (weeks 7-8)

The first Hack Reactor class has graduated started working, a new cohort has arrived and my class is now the senior class. The new students are awesome! Considering how selective Hack Reactor is, I can't say I'm surprised, but it has been great to meet them all.

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Talk notes: Sublime, VI and command line orientation

These are the notes from my presentation for the new class at Hack Reactor.  I know the time constraints make it tough to answer everything, so feel free to ask here.

Choose your own talk

  • How to exit or save & exit VIM
  • How to enable/disable VIM mode in Sublime
  • Sublime short-cuts in general
  • Multi-select
  • Strip out HTML
  • How to learn in general
  • Build JS from Sublime

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Hack Reactor Diaries #4 (week 6)

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!

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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.

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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.

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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.

(more…)