Two weeks ago we began our thesis projects at Hack Reactor - I’m working with a great team on a platform for holding elections - and that meant deciding what to do with our last few weeks of education before hitting the job market. We decided that we wanted to maximize the number of technologies we could learn on this project, so it’s really a canvas for exposing us to as much new material…
I'm a recovering politico and brand marketer diving head-first into the world of software development, and always searching for ways to impact the world for the better. These are my thoughts.
Bug Hunt: Only In Production
For the past few weeks, we've been working in groups on our "greenfield" projects - our chance to create something totally new, from the ground up, with a team of four. We had a few days in class to get started, a week to work while school was closed, and then one day to tidy up before a YCombinator Demo Day-style presentation to our classmates. My team built SnackReactor (which we'll release later this week) -…
How To Set Up Continuous Deployment to Azure from Circle-CI
Continuous delivery and continuous deployment are exciting frontiers in software development. If set up properly, any code committed to a project's repository can pushed live after passing a series of defined tests in a simulated environment. As part of my first group project at Hack Reactor, I wanted to learn how to set up a continuous deployment system, so that we could concentrate on developing great software rather than deploying it. For this, I chose Circle-CI, which was initially easy to set up and had a great user interface.
We chose to host our project on Microsoft's Azure platform, for no better reason than the fact that they've been very generous with credits for Hack Reactor students (and YCombinator startups
My First Hackathon
Last Thursday I was beat down and tired after four long days of class, with two more to go. But when the prompt for our afterhours hackathon came out, I knew I had to attend.
I've always loved to jump into code, but my front-end design skills have been lacking. I've been pouring my extra time into making up for that, and this hackathon was the perfect opportunity. Working with my classmate Artur, we were given two hours to clone the design of a site of our choosing. Selections ranged from the simple Hacker News to one of my favorite old joke sites, Zombo.com.
Artur and I went for visual pop, and took on Pinterest. We got off to
On jQuery Animations + The Queue
One aspect of Hack Reactor that I've been particularly impressed with is the way the curriculum is structured; we're always learning multiple concepts. Today, we not only continued our exploration of BackboneJS, but also taught ourselves CoffeeScript. Early last week, we found ourselves refreshing our jQuery while learning about the different JavaScript instantiation patterns. How did we do that? By coding up a dance party, with different dancers moving about the screen, each sharing some methods…