Reflecting on Week One

Fancy Fridays

Apparently the instructors dress up on Fridays as a way of reversing the typical office environment, since they are wearing casual clothing Monday - Thursday. It was a bit of a shock to see them all walk into the room Friday morning with button down shirts, jackets, and slacks. 

The Sorting

One thing I haven't yet mentioned is that we were "sorted" into houses earlier in the week, by which I mean we numbered off until we were divided into five groups of 5 - 6 people each: Gryffindor, Ravenclaw, Hufflepuff, Slytherin, and Dumbledore's Army. By total chance, I ended up in Ravenclaw! This is ridiculously exciting to me. I actually have a Ravenclaw shirt, which I wore to class the next day and it earned our house five points for "taking it really seriously." Our head of house is Cynthia, who is an amazing instructor and an great role model. You can read more about her in her awesome profile on the Hackbright website (scroll down a bit to get to the instructors).

Silicon Chef

We also have a really cool group of people in Ravenclaw. The six of us are going to be a team at the hardware hackathon Silicon Chef next weekend. So excited! I've never done anything with hardware ever, and before Hackbright I had heard about the hackathon but basically thought I couldn't possibly go to it. Then the instructors were like, "We are doing an intro workshop that you can come to and then the hackathon will be really easy." So that's that. If they say I will be ready for a hackathon, I guess it must be true. 

This particular hackathon is going to be mostly women and very beginner-friendly. It is also not very competitive, which makes me feel more comfortable. Furthermore, it is not a 24-hours straight type of hackathon. We will go all day Saturday, be forced to leave by 8pm, and then we will start up again at 10am the next morning. They are providing food and tshirts, and we even get a free arduino kit just for showing up. I'm excited to find out if hardware is something I would be interested in exploring further.

Recent Exercises

On Thursday I paired with Breanna, a math teacher. Unsurprisingly, we look at coding challenges with exactly the same approach. We are practically the same person on that front. It was really fun working our way through the problems together. On Thursday we made our own implementation of several functions, such as len(), which finds the length of a list, and append(), which adds something to the end of a list. 

Fridays are sort of a study hall day. It's a time to go back through exercises you feel like you didn't quite understand, or try a new challenge, or try coding on your own, or try to get something set up on your own laptop so that you can code at home more easily. Breanna and I stuck together on Friday also and we did a really fun challenge where we had to write a program that takes a file of text and counts the number of a's, b's, c's, etc and reports those counts back to you. We felt really awesome after we figured out a way to do it, but Nick started asking us questions about how many times we were having the program go through the file. Slowly, little by little, we changed how the program worked so that it was as efficient as possible. It was really fun and we learned a lot by having Nick ask us questions and then talking to each other about how to fix each little problem.

Happy Hour

At 5:00 on Friday, we stopped working and brought out the alcohol. Luckily there was a small group of women who don't really like drinking, so we banded together and talked a lot about Harry Potter, Joss Whedon, Goodreads, and general geekery, among other things. I had a really great time with everyone and there were some entertaining interjections from some tipsy (read: drunk) people. I also gushed about my wedding to the people who were really into the idea of a geek wedding, so that was fun too. It's always nice to be appreciated for your eccentricities. 

I'm Super Annoying

We each have to give a lightning talk (5 to 10 minutes) about something vaguely related to tech. Obviously I signed up for the first date available (Oct 8) because I am super annoying. It's also partly because I want to get mine over with and not be compared with people giving their talks before me. I've been looking around at topics and I think I may do mine on Blender, an open-source 3D modeling program that you can control using Python (the main programming language we do at Hackbright). We'll see. Either way, it's interesting and I will enjoy looking into it more. Mostly spending the weekend relaxing and catching up on sleep/life. 

Tomorrow will be a long day. After class I am going to the intro to arduino workshop until pretty late at night. Hopefully I'll be able to post on Tuesday. Looking forward to more shenanigans and hacking!