When I first started Hackbright, I thought regular blogs--even just weekly ones--would be easy. Boy was I wrong! There's been so much material being injected in our minds every day that it takes me so much willpower just to stay awake past 10 or 11pm (in comparison to when I used to go bed past 1am easily with longer work hours). But anyway, here are the highlights of last week:
Monday
I think I could speak for almost everyone in our cohort when I say that it was refreshing to be able to take a break from all the hard Python classes and material and transition into something we were more or less pretty familiar and/or comfortable with: HTML & CSS.
There's been quite a good amount of changes I've noticed in HTML5 and CSS (3?) since I last really, truly wrote HTML & CSS (and reviewing the languages on Codecademy don't count) so I was happy to have gotten a refresher.
Tuesday
We learned Flask! I had seen a Flask demo before at a PyLadies study group way back when and have always wondered more on its features and functionality. It was really satisfying to finally get the "Aha!" moment of how all the scripts and programs we've been writing in Python can be "applied" or translated into an accessible format on websites, web apps, etc. For the longest time I've been confused as to where the connection between Python and the web lies, as I feel like I've been coding Python in an isolated environment that's only executed in the typical Terminal console.
In the morning we also had a great Career Coffee session with Wendy from Career Services. I've gotta say it was one of the most hilarious moments (IMO) when she was addressing the 3-6 month average time it takes a post-Hackbright grad to land a job, and said something along the lines of "Some of you may decide to take a month long vacation after this program, are currently pregnant, or will find out you're pregnant and decide to take some time off for yourselves..." I could literally feel the oxygen drain from the room as everyone gasped and could not contain the laughter. I think I can say for sure that getting pregnant is the last thing on everyone's minds right now.
Wednesday
Big day--we met our mentors! It was nerve-wracking and also exciting because we were all so eager to find out who they were, but at the same time nervous about what we were simply going to talk about for at least an hour. Two of my mentors showed up, and the other I actually met this week. They're all super different in their backgrounds and have a lot to offer; I can think of one mentor who will make sure that whatever I turn in has beautiful code, another will guide me to make my project look great presentation wise, and the third one can give me lots of guidance in interviewing.
Just in the few conversations I've had with them I've definitely changed my perception on job hunting in the industry; before, I'd always thought I'd want to work for a company whose product I use all the time...I definitely still feel this way, but since the world is oftentimes the opposite of perfect, my mentor suggested I widen my reach and revise my thinking instead to be: I'd want to work for a company whose product I directly OR indirectly use. In other words, building a product that you simply know many people use--even if it's not yourself--can bring great satisfaction.
Thursday
Testing, testing 1 2 3. We took a dive into debugging and testing in the lectures, but not before we had to get more practice with using Flask in our morning lab pair programming. My partner and I decided to power through lunch to get as much as we could get done in the exercise, as it was a really lofty one with many "layers" of thinking and conceptualizing involved for each step of the solution.
Also, I'm continually amazed at how much work our instructors and staff put into creating the exercises, homework, assessments, and any accompanying material. Not only do they make the instructions entertaining to read, but they also even go so far as to create functioning websites of the imaginary businesses and characters featured again and again in our materials.
I gave my tech talk this afternoon as well; I thought I kind of just fumbled through it without much preparation (I did not want to psych myself out; this tends to happen when I practice giving a presentation and hear the horrible sound that is my own voice), but I'm happy to say that everyone paid attention til the end and asked me questions. One of my cohort mates went so far as to tell me the next day that she enjoyed my lightning talk!
Friday
So, there was a city-wide (ok, not actually true; it only hit downtown and the adjacent neighborhoods which basically means city-wide during the day) power outage! For some reason this did not compute in my head when I was crossing all the streets that had no working traffic signals or lights. I just thought it was some construction going on.
We managed to get some review in for the previous week's assessment before lunch. One of my amazing cohort mates took 10+ of us on a field trip to her Google office for free lunch!! So many of us were super excited to finally be able to experience the coveted free tech company meal, in particular Google's. However as we were rushing back to try to make it back to our 2pm lecture we found out Hackbright was gonna call it a day. It was both a great and also worrying thing for me because it was great to be able to enjoy the sunshine and some much needed day drinking, but also worrisome that we would be behind our schedule on learning...and also--of course I decided not to charge my phone before leaving the house that morning because I thought I could just do it at lecture. But of course the day I make this decision there is a power outage, so I felt I was worried about being powerless in a powerless city the whole time and couldn't stay with my cohortmates for that long lest I risk not being able to meet up with Jesse afterwards.
So after getting a drink at Mojo with the ladies I called it a day with them, met up with Jesse and the Spritz team for drinks, got more drinks with Jesse and his friend and went home happily full for a relaxing weekend!
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