Video Of The Week: Diversity In Tech Startups

Source: http://avc.com/2016/02/video-of-the-week-diversity-in-tech-startups/

This is such a good panel discussion. It's not just philosophizing on the importance of diverse views. It's a dollars and sense conversation of vini, vidi, vici by entrepreneurs of color. It's a great way to spend 45 mins. Just do it.

Today I learned: An alternative method to setup Sequelize with associations

On Tuesday, my class was working on associations in Sequelize. We were getting lots of errors because when syncing tables with associations, the associated table must pre-exist the sync. 

So, if Users has many Posts, to set up that association, the Posts model needs to exist, before trying to sync the Users table. 

Today I learned, an interesting method for setting up Sequelize models and associations so you don’t get conflicts when syncing tables that depend on others to exist :

https://github.com/sequelize/express-example

Essentially, this method breaks up the model creation and the association creation into separate consecutive steps. And does the sync later. 

I'm still in class and still processing but had to share this game-changing (for me) information right away! Eeeep!

Chimamanda Corner: "Forget about likability"

I think that what our society teaches young girls, and I think it’s also something that’s quite difficult for even older women and self-professed feminists to shrug off, is that idea that likability is an essential part of you, of the space you occupy in the world, that you’re supposed to twist yourself into shapes to make yourself likable that you’re supposed to hold back sometimes, pull back, don’t quite say, don’t be too pushy because you have to be likable.
And I say that’s bullshit.
 
So what I want to say to young girls is forget about likability. If you start thinking about being likable you are not going to tell your story honestly, because you are going to be so concerned with not offending, and that’s going to ruin your story so forget about likability. And also the world is such a wonderful, diverse and multifaceted place that there’s somebody who’s going to like you, you don’t need to twist yourself into shapes.

Trick of the day: The Double Bitwise Not

Ever need to drop some points (decimals), like they were dead weight ...or live weight around your waist preventing you from fitting into that one outfit? 

If you ignore that bad analogy, you can see some examples of the long way round below:

var a = 4.9
Math.floor(a) //4

//OR

parseInt(a)//4

That's not a lot of code, but then check this out! 

var a = 4.9
~~a //4

How cool is that?!?! Let me know what you think. 


http://james.padolsey.com/javascript/double-bitwise-not/

Don't add that feature

 http://www.chau.cc/a-dusty-tome/dont-add-that-fking-feature

 

Thomas Chau, an amazing engineer that I know, wrote an article about minimalist design that made my heart sing. 

He breaks down his argument in relatable terms: time and money. Short and sweet, it's a great article to ponder and a great design philosophy to add to your toolbox. 

Have a read and let me know what you think.  

Blogging backlog

My bootcamp is done! And I have numerous blog posts pending and backlogged to edit, write and make reality. But real life is here and you know who has to focus and on getting a job first — which is a full time job. 

You've got to research companies, practice interviews, learn about technologies and get deep where you were only wide. Knowledge is power now. Things are quantitatively important. Faking, bluffing and bs-ing is not an option. I like to think of it as a great leveling of the playing field. I picture it as the ultimate challenge to put up or shut up — or at the very least to try again later. 

In any case, I don't have time to write this post. BUT, I wanted to put some resources here for any friends also looking to get hired (and my future self who might forget everything in a week and have to start over).

Why Hiring is So Hard in Tech
Take home point: Show, don't tell

10 Interview Questions Every JavaScript Developer Should Know
Take home point:
 Read ALL your notes from Foundations plus some. (For none Grace Hopper students, read You don't know JS)

 

 

At the risk of homelessness, I did this...

It is important to take risks. You will learn a lot about yourself and your world. You will challenge assumptions and come up against harsh realities. And with any risk, you can fail. 

I wanted to become a web developer very badly. It was a scary proposition. I would be leaving a very cushy position with lots of great benefits and perks. A good job, that I did well but left me unfulfilled. I needed to change things and make a bigger contribution than that role offered. I'm not getting any younger. I needed to act. 

I got certain things in order. Made specific plans. There were many unknowns but I felt confident that they would be sorted out given certain expected factors. Now, with weeks left in my program, uncertainty has become more of a bedfellow than I expected. Deals that were made to bolster the viability of this venture have fallen through, avenues of income, security gone in a blink. 

With 3 weeks to go, I find myself trying to focus on the final major project of the course (the one to impress potential employers), finding housing for July and beyond, not worrying about the surgery of very close family members and my bank account. It is all incredibly distracting. My focus is drawn every which way as I pack up my apartment with no new one to put my things, as I debate the structure of our app with my teammates, as I try not to cry on every phone call with those closest to me, as I try to remain together as things fall apart. 

I'm confident in my ability. I'm certain that this program was one of the best decisions that I ever made, as I feel the most useful that I've felt in a while. I know that I will provide great value wherever I go. But the world will not wait the 2-3 weeks that I need before I can afford to live in this city.

I'm at the mercy of the kindness of friends and strangers. It's part of a really good story to tell in the future. It just sucks to be in it, present and clear. This too shall pass. Soon and very soon.  

Pushing through it.

The Art Of Conscious Leadership

Jeff Weiner, CEO of LinkedIn did this interview at Wisdom 2.0 2013. As I listen to it today, I find myself thinking about events of a month ago, where I wanted to find empathy.

Now as I listen, I realize my goal was actually to find a way to act on my compassion. I was able to recognize her suffering, but felt unprepared/unable to appropriately do something to alleviate it. My colleague was having a rough time and I wanted to help but couldn't. 

We have since had multiple discussions about that time in our journey and are much better for it. 

How are you engaging as a mindful leader?

  • Compassion over empathy

Fighting Apathy : Finding Empathy

Project Phase: Where you work with others. 

This is the 10th week of our 13 week bootcamp. My peers and I have transitioned from Juniors to Seniors and a new group of women have started their journey to be developers. It's a very exciting time. 

As seniors, we have tested our knowledge in assessments and now we are onto projects.  

There are 3 projects that make up senior phase:  

  • Stackstore
  • Personal Project
  • Capstone

Each project has a role. The first to simulate working as a team and using git. The second to stretch the imagination to try new things. And the third to create a portfolio level product to present to potential employers. 

It's all a journey and part of a journey. I have a particular goal in mind. I'm aiming to be hired within a month of leaving. 

I'm soaking up all the information like it's life and I'm putting it into practice like it's medicine. That translates to a hyper activation of my competitive gene.  

I desire to meet people at their level, but I can also get frustrated when I feel they're not trying. In this artificial abridged version of the coding process where stress is a higher factor, I have snipped and snapped, cringed and cracked and it can be hard to find compassion and patience at times. 

Last week, I worked with a teammate and made demands of her, that this week I found myself not heeding. The frustration I felt with her and her progress and work on our Stackstore project got mirrored to me cruel karma style for my Stackathon. I found compassion, humility and abasement where I once had scorn and indifference. 

Everyone has a level and it is not linear. We are all working to improve and excel in our own ways at our own pace and it is important to learn how to catch another's perspective.

I remember several moments in our Stackstore project being frustrated with a teammate who needed more technical and emotional support than I could give. In the moment, I wanted to help but felt ill-equipped to handle her issues as well as complete my given tasks. It was a struggle monitoring emotions and managing expectations and at times, everyone got a little shorter. It is easy to get self-righteous and think "why don't you ask for help before things implode?" "Why do you spend so much time debugging that one issue?" "Why can't you just do this thing just so?"

Dispassionate. Straightforward. Brush your shoulders, you sure handled that! But then...

Stackathon. 

I aimed high. I decided to write a desktop app using/learning upwards of 4 technologies I'd never worked on before:

NWJS

Electron

Webrtc

Gulp

and more... 

Hyper ambition like a boss!  

Then I did all the things I requested my teammate not do. Like her, I buckled when I should have bucked up. I couldn't concentrate in the noisy environment, so I thought shutting people out and "trying harder" would help, but it didn't. Isolation made it harder to reach out and for others to reach in. And in that weekend, I could feel on the deepest level, how needing/wanting/desiring/craving help could feel like drowning in a crowded pool next to a floating device. I didn't know how to ask for assistance. And my nonverbal communication made it difficult for others to offer support. 

When I started writing this piece, I was in a space of "I want to find a way to bridge the gap in my empathy". Today, I feel like I got what I'd wished, for monkey paw style — with unintended consequences.  

I wanted to properly understand how my teammate felt so I could know how to better support her and the versions of her in my future. After this week, I feel closer to that goal. I have a lot of humility to practice. It's hard remembering no one is perfect. 

New Facebook privacy settings

 https://www.wired.com/2016/06/go-check-facebooks-new-privacy-settings/

 

A couple of weeks ago, I went to an event at Facebook about a unique role they had called Solutions Engineer. The job they do is a mix of client work and programming.  A 50/50 time split between consulting on ad sale solutions with Facebook's business clients and writing code to tailor a solution for your client and improve Facebook's offering. A Solutions Engineer becomes the conduit between users and full time engineers to help direct the development of the product towards the actual ways people use Facebook. 

It was a really cool event. We heard from female managers on the team, got to hear about the daily work of engineers in that role, got tips on how to apply and more.  

One thing I learned was how much people in that role care about making an impact and making a useful product for both their clients and their users. 

The solution engineers at Facebook are doing great at their jobs. The Facebook Ad Network is constantly growing and is a massive coding win. The programmer in me is super impressed. That said, I'm hyper aware and vigilant about the protection of private information. I believe people should be given a choice about what they want to share and with whom it should be shared. So, I'm happy to read that as consumers we're being given some more control of how our trust is being handled. 

Engineering is more than what can be done, but also what should be done. The moral edge of controlling access to information along those terms is where security protocol should be defined. 

Fear share

It's easy to think your fears

Keep you company

That asking for help

Makes a crowd:

You and your fear,

A couple.

Adding a friend,

A mentor,

A stranger,

Makes a three;

Where aphorisms agree

Is crowded

By many measures.

But you should choose your company-

Flip and switch

Which is which

Because that person,

Can scare your fears away,

Revise the coupling

That made you stay

Alone in the dark

Of fear

Whose mean company

Didn't build you

Support you

Help you-

Like that person could

If that person's good

But you can't know how much

Love and care

You can hope to receive

Unless you share

You are not alone

One of the hardest things to feel is isolated in a crowd; to feel like you're suffering alone.

One of the best ways to suffer alone is to keep it to yourself-that thing that makes you feel inadequate, that takes away your agency/power/confidence/esteem.

Learning how to ask for help is a powerful tool. Learning how to give help equally so. I am fortunate to have had amazing mentors who have been kind with support after periods of lonely suffering. Every time I talk to them, I feel guilty for not being able to reach out sooner. But, perhaps that wait is what makes my appreciation for their help so much more full.

Today, I was given the opportunity to be like them; to give words of encouragement and wisdom. Channeling them and challenging myself to emulate the best things in them, helped me feel more confident in my own struggles. As I affirmed my classmate, I was getting affirmation because she had come to me, had trusted me, had chosen me to help with her load. There is a honor wrapped in the trusting reach of vulnerability. Moreover, there is a camaraderie in knowing you're not the only one climbing the mountains of doubt that come from trying to push past zones of comfort.

In asking for help, my classmate helped me. It can feel like such a risk trusting someone with our fears and anxieties, because so often we've been punished from trusting the wrong person. But the sharing is necessary.

I'm grateful that she would choose me. I hope that she feels the same benefit and more for confiding in me. I don't presume to have all the answers. But it does feel nice to be asked. :)

GTB: Checkpoint

3 weeks in and we have covered 3/4 of the SEAN stack and had a internal hackathon where we mixed with the Fullstack Academy Juniors and Seniors.

I'm surprised how much I've learnt and grown. I'm learning the strengths of my peers and how to ask for help. For the most part I'm trying to be able to lookup and understand solutions on my own. But in the economy of time, there is no shame in asking someone to help point you in the right direction.

The weather has cleared up and not too soon. I could feel the stress of 3 weeks and gloomy weather starting to sap my energy and dampen my spirits. I was glad to have the hackathon to vary the pace a bit.

For the hackathon we used the Tessel 2  microcontroller (and a variety of its modules) that run on Node JS  to create hardware projects. It was also our first team challenge. I got to exercise some leadership in that session and gathered some take home points:

- Delegation is key

- Engagement is crucial

- And it's important to have a game plan of how to handle conflict in high stressed environments

I'd love to be perfect and to say I know how to handle all difficult situations like a boss. But if I'm completely honest with myself, I know that there are things that I could do better.

For the hackathon, I was assigned to a team of 5, plus a fellow (a rep from the school). We got the team assignments ahead of time and from the moment I saw mine, I was apprehensive. A person with whom I'd had a difficult pair programming session was to be part of my team and I could feel the anxiety of having to work with her.

For many people, it is natural to want to avoid conflict. You find ways to avoid that person at work/school/play who challenges you emotionally, who tests your patience or makes you weary for one reason or another. It was my intent after our partnering session to engage in such a game of hide and never seek. But life isn't meant to be easy and comforts are meant to be tested.

I could have asked to change teams, but didn't. It would communicate struggle or an inability to handle my own issues. I could have laid back and given up my agency and let the team succeed or fail without any real effort from me. But that would directly interfere with my sense of competition and excellence. So I jumped in with both feet.

No one died and we were able to work together with minimal casualties. But I realize I should have asked for help. Either talking to my testing teammate and working out a plan of how we could check ourselves in difficult situations, or alerting our fellow to my difficulty so that she could help navigate some of the high stress/tension moments.

Funnily enough our fellow didn't catch the secret war we were having. In her words, we had a very smooth group process. Perhaps, that is say that we were able to maintain a strained deference in order to not incur collateral damage. Or it's something else altogether.

I am open to the possibility that there is no actual adversary and my interpretation of such is really a breakdown in communication styles. One of my teammates who worked with us picked up tension as well, so I know it's not wholly imagined. But my task is to figure how much of it is my creation: a fulfillment of my anxiety if you will.

The hackathon assignment serves as a reminder that I can't always avoid conflict and so must develop tools to address it. I figure I have two options:

1. I will need to ask for mediation assistance and/or,

2. I will need to talk to this peer before our next involuntary partnering.

I know I'm afraid of how she will react but I fear the unresolved tension way more. It affects my work.  And in the famous words of Sweetie Brown: "ain't nobody got time for that!"

Sequelize

MEAN became SEAN with a Promise that was thenable

Today our task was to create a wiki with persistent storage in a SQL database. We could run powerful SQL queries in JavaScript syntax and methodology with built in promises to handle async calls to our database.  

Further Sequelize has built in validation options, virtual fields that can use items in our database tables, built in Bluebird Promise methods to supplement the new implementations on Promises in vanilla ES6 JavaScript.  

It is easy to feel powerful working with such intuitive tools. Mix in some swig to template your pages and you're off to the races.  

For a fact, I'm learning how much I hate CSS. I'm sincerely hoping SASS will make it a bit less irksome. It is so hard to develop responsive templates that work the way intended in different view ports. But that is another post I suspect.  

Friday will be a checkpoint on Express, Node and SQL (Sequelize). It's both exciting and scary. Hackathon afterwards though so all wins over all. Till then gotta grab the few ZZZZZ I've been missing.  

SQL

SELECT awesome
FROM GraceHopper
WHERE it happens everyday

In case you missed it, we're learning SQL and databases.  Super cool!

A good grasp on Math and set theory is definitely an advantage on this part of our course.

I've learned about queries, sub-queries, joins, intersect and that Kevin Bacon has had a lot of costars.

For this workshop, we worked on the IMDB database to surface results for a number of queries. It was quite exciting.

We used command line SQLite 3 to execute increasingly difficult queries in a very intense learn by doing session.

This was the first weekday workshop where we got to choose our partners or work on our own. It was also the first where we turned to each other (and sometimes fellows) for help and support. We learned from each other in pairs and groups, in ad hoc teaching circles and animated conversations. Along with the stress of trying to finish all the queries before review, there was an exciting fury of trying new things in code while indulging in movie geekery.

As a yelper, i.e. a person who yelps, I was eeping and oohing a lot. I also got headaches and brain cramps too. But you win some and learn more, right?

Showing up has been so amazing. Lots of great things are happening.

Real life is still growling and snarling commanding me to handle health insurance and housing. Now that I can query data, maybe I can make those searches simpler. One can only hope. :)