The End and The Beginning

My final week at Makers Academy was such an amazing culmination of the 12 week journey I started in September. My team, Denise, Sandrine and Sean are an brilliant group of coders and we kicked off our project by brainstorming and planning out our social web karaoke app pandapop! We discussed all the things a karaoke app should include to ensure the best possible experience.

The technologies we chose to use were Ruby on Rails, AngularJS, YouTube API, HTML5/CSS3, jQuery, RSpec and Capybara, PostgreSQL, jQuery. Version 1 of the site is live and ready to be used at your next karaoke night, the team are back in the office this week to work on Version 2 (which includes being able to upload videos of your very own karaoke session!)

Otherwise, post-Makers for me will entail going through my work for the last 12 weeks and making sure everything is completed and hopefully working on some more side projects.

Week 10: The calm before the storm

This was our last week before final projects start…eek! I spent much of this week working on things I wanted to get more experience with, like Javascript. I also learnt how to build Ruby Gems today, which was a lot easier than I expected.

We had our jamboree on Wednesday with over 50 ideas pitched for the final projects! Ideas were pitched from building autonomous robots to web apps that can take over the world. Haha. It was fun as usual to hear the amazing ideas that a group of coders can come up with. Our cohort then received a list of the ideas to pick our top three choices with the aim of ‘easily’ sorting us into groups for the next two weeks.

Thursday was our usual cohort social at Queen of Hoxton which was lots of fun and ended in a session of karaoke (of course). And Friday was the BIG REVEAL….

• Artou: Arduino robot
• Hackathon Tracker: An app to help you track progress when participating in a hackathon
• Karaoke Rating Site: A web app that will fetch, rate and sort the best karaoke videos from YouTube
• Meeting App: A mobile app that will organise your life!
• StackOverflow Youtube: Video tutorials, explanations of top StackOverflow topics
• Points: A web app that will allow you to give points to friends for all those things that go unappreciated

Our “Yay, we’re a team lunch”

My amazing team is Denise, Sandrine and Sean and we are going to be building our Karaoke Rating Site using Ruby, Rails, AngularJS, HTML, CSS, YouTube Data API, YouTube Analytics API, YouTube Player API, Echonest and the rest we’re still investigating.

I also promised I would share the live website link of our website JumpAround from last week’s #makerthon, well, here it is.

Week 9: Makerthon

Another hectic week down! This week we got into groups of four to build a website/app over 3 days. I lucked out and had an amazing team to work with (shout out to Stephen, Camilla and Craig). We used Rails and Active Record with a little bit of Javascript and Ruby thrown in for good measure to create a website to find Sean’s Jumper (bit of an inside joke). We incorporated a google map, a shop with Stripe payment, a gallery of sightings of the jumper, all of which can be liked. We have made it live but would like to make a couple of tweaks before I share it on here. Here’s a screen shot in the meantime 🙂

Screenshot of jumperaround website

We only have one week left before final projects now and reality is starting to set in! Can’t believe how much we have all learnt and how amazing all the friends I’ve made are.

Tomorrow it’s off to Silicon Milk Roundabout to kick off the job search.

Week 8 Summary: Rails

Night out with the Makers crowd

This week we started working with Rails, Bootstrap and integrating gems and all the previous technologies. We built a clone of Yelp and have been tasked with building an Instagram clone, yes the projects are getting bigger!

This week was also a big one on the social side  with a start at the pub on Tuesday night and with lots of Makers birthdays and a big night out on Thursday night. It was super fun but obviously resulted in a few less than productive hours at Makers this week, eeek!

Given this fact I spent from 10am Saturday morning until 11am this morning coding away at the Wix hackathon. It was lots of fun and I will definitely go to another hackathon. On top of it one of the Makers teams came second! Well done Denise, Spike, James and Ben.

So, week 9 next week, and while I’m still definitely feeling overwhelmed and like there is always more and more to learn, this week I thought about how much I have learnt in what is a very short space of time and felt a teensy bit proud of myself! Hee hee.

Lastly, I feel a little warm inside knowing that I’m going to walk away from this course with a host of amazing people I didn’t know before as friends (but I’m sad I won’t be spending 12 hours a day with them…back to reality!)

Week 7 Summary

This was our first week as the senior cohort. It was fun! What it means is we actually have some knowledge (although obviously still very limited) to pass on to the new cohort. What’s more is they seem like a cool crowd that we will get on well with.

Otherwise I have been learning Node.js, Web sockets and MongDB this week. I’ve actually really enjoyed it and feel like I’m at least “kind-a” getting my head around the concepts and am officially able to make a live chat room. Awesome no?

Data badge for Twitter Clone

I also got my latest badge for our challenge to rebuild Twitter. YAY! We’ve made progress our table tennis tournament manager too (finally) and we can now have players in groups, players playing games and players with profile pages!

Today I’m going to join Denise from my cohort at a Coder Dojo event in Whitechapel.  Their goal is to teach young people to be programmers, and we’re going to attempt to help them do that!

Also, in case you want to stalk Maker’s blogs like I did before joining here are all of those from my cohort:

• Denise Yu
• Stephen Giles
• Camilla van Klinken
• Victoria Barr
• Sandrine Zhang Ferron
• Yvette Cook
• Zeeshan Rasool
• Bernard Mordan
• Karin Nielsen

Week 6 Summary

Left to right: Tim, Sandrine, Spike, Denise, Sean

This week was our final week as the “junior’s” and that meant saying goodbye to a whole bunch of awesome people that have helped us through the first weeks of the course. I know many of them will be back as alumni’s but it is odd to think we will walk in Monday morning with a whole new cohort. The send-off was amazing though and there were a lot of us who dressed up for Graduween. Here are the team that went dressed from Battle Royale.

Other than the party side of things, the projects were brilliant from a mood map which judges happiness across the globe based on tweets, to an app that helps housemates manage their funds and a website that helps freelancers socialise and contribute to each other. It was very inspiring!

Our (the September cohort) work for the week was Javascript, jQuery and working with JSON API’s. We used these technologies to create a thermostat and a website which pulls through profiles from Github and allows you to display them in a forum.

For the weekend challenge we are recreating our Twitter clone from a couple of weeks ago in Javascript, jQuery and incorporating our own API. I will post my Ruby ‘Twitter’ to Heroku so you can see that version and will of course share the 2.0 version when it’s completed.

Otherwise, on to a new week! Woop woop!

Week 6: Day 4: Thermocat

I feel very proud of myself this week because I have paired with someone different every day. Pair programming is something they really advocate here at Makers and I really enjoy it. It’s really great having someone to discuss problems with and solutions with and by changing pairs every day you also get to compare your solutions with others.

We’ve been building a Thermostat this week and I started out building this with Denise yesterday. Basically it needs to register the temperature, increase, decrease, reset and have power save modes that do different things. Today I’m working with Anna and our task is to now link this thermostat with an external weather API to make it update with the current temperature based on your location. Yes, like a thermometer. One of the challenges is that browsers interpret the data you send them differently and so you will think you’ve got it working but then you try it in a different browser and it’s not! As usual, when it’s live I will share with you.

Earlier this week I also paired with Sean to build a Rock Paper Scissors Lizard Spock game in Javascript this time. You can play the game here.

Tomorrow is Graduween here at makers, so we will have to say our farewells to the awesome August cohort but at least we get to do it in costumes! Haha,  pics will definitely follow.