fb
BLOG

Welcome to the Interwebs (Hackbright Academy – Week 5)

O hai! We finally made it to the web development section of the class. Actually, that was over a week ago, and I’ve had this half-finished draft of a blog post saved on my Tumblr dashboard for the same amount of time. Sorry! I’ve been busy (see below).

By Katherine Hennes (Engineering Fellow, Hackbright Academy – summer 2013 class)

We began with a brief lecture on HTML and CSS, then moved quickly to Javascript (HELLO CURLY BRACES, so nice to see you). I’d attended a lot of front-end workshops over the past year (most of them sponsored by Girl Develop It), so this was mostly review, but it was great reinforcement, and I clearly needed the practice with DOM manipulation.

We’ve spent most of the last week assembling tiny, primitive web apps with Flask, Bootstrap, and SQL/SQLAlchemy – tying up everything we’ve learned so far in a nice little box. Working with an ORM => more practice with object-oriented programming, as well as a relief from some of the more tedious SQL scripting. Also, having had some (very limited) experience with Rails prior to Hackbright Academy, I really enjoyed the process of building an app from the ground up, in Flask, rather than poking around and trying to make sense of an automagically-conjured-but-super-opaque prefab directory tree à la Rails (or Django, apparently).

In fact, I like Flask so much that I’m planning to build the web interface for my final project in Sinatra, Flask’s rough equivalent for Ruby.

On that note, I decided on my final project, though I have a huge pile of research to burrow through (and soo many rabbit holes to jump down) before I can make any concrete decisions about what it will look like. But I’m really excited about all of the possibilities, in addition to the fact that I’m going to learn SO MUCH.

It doesn’t even matter whether or not I manage to accomplish everything that I’m aiming for (though I’ll get there if humanly possible), I’m going to get to learn a ton about computer science theory and implementation.

Another thing that I think is worth pointedly mentioning: I’ve been hella busy.

Maybe busier than I’ve ever been in my life. There are always more Meetups, tech events, or mentor meetings to pencil in, and it often feels like I’ve been going nonstop for the past month, especially since I usually spend my “nights off” coding or researching. And I imagine that, as we enter project-, then interviewing mode, things will only get more hectic.

I was reflecting on the fact that the program is strangely almost half over, and I came up with a few things I’m excited to do, post-Hackbright:

  • * Become a full-time, full-stack developer!
  • * Resume my membership at Planet Granite, the prettiest and least smelly climbing-gym-with-a-view-of-a-famous-bridge. I fell hard for rock climbing (heh… heh) earlier this year.
  • * Once again enjoy my daily espresso macchiato from fine artisanal coffee purveyors of the Bay Area.
  • * Start taking long bike rides/bike touring again on the weekends.
  • * Turn my back on freelance SEO writing. Forever.

Things I’m not excited about returning to, post-Hackbright:

  • * No more Hackbright 🙁
  • * Student loan payments 🙁

xkcd_python

This is already long, so I think I’ll end here. P.S., Python has really grown on me.

This post was originally posted at Katherine Hennes’ blog.

[easy-social-share buttons="facebook,twitter,mail" counters=1 counter_pos="inside" total_counter_pos="hidden" fixedwidth_px="70" fixedwidth_align="left" total_counter_pos="right" style="button" template="copy-retina" point_type="simple"]
RELATED POSTS
RECENT POSTS
November 09, 2023
The Shift Toward Cloud Computing and the Role of Cloud Engineers
October 31, 2023
Data Everywhere: The Future of Data Science and Business Intelligence
June 05, 2023
Version Control Systems: Subversion vs Git
June 05, 2023
Open-Source Programming and How to Contribute to Projects
CATEGORIES