Since Flatiron School is over, I’m committing myself to reading a new programming book each week and blogging about the important key points from each chapter. I’ve decided to start with Practical Object-Oriented Design in Ruby (POODIR) by Sandi Metz. Reading POODIR helped clarify and reinforce programming concepts:

• What is object orientation?
• What should go in a class?
• Design patterns and practices that allow code to change easily
• What does it mean when objects know too much about each other? (And why that is bad!)
• How to write reuseable code (think: duck typing, modules, superclasses, inheritance)

Today at Flatiron School we started researching common Computer Science questions we might be asked during interviews. A common topic is the difference between Arrays and Linked Lists. I’ve used arrays lots of times in coding, but I had no idea what a linked list is. Below is a summary about what the differences between the two and their common use cases.

Both Arrays and Linked Lists are used to store linear data of similar types. Depending on your application or requirement, you may elect to pick one over the other.

My new Flatiron School team, Anthony, Ei-lene, Eugene, and I are working on HandRaise, an application to handle student questions during lab or working sessions. HandRaise will help us keep track of which student questions are up next for teachers to answer. In this post, I explain how we implemented some basic authorization to allow or restrict specific users in taking certain actions.

This post, part two of two, explains some customizations I included in a basic form for creating and editing groups on my team’s app, Jane’s Lunch. In my previous post, part one, I explained how I installed a timepicker for the groups form. In this post, I explain how I created a custom form helper to normalize the states input for user addresses.

My Flatiron School team, Crystal, Tim and Tyler, and I recently presented our group project, Jane’s Lunch, at a NYC on Rails MeetUp. Jane’s Lunch is a web application that makes lunch delivery for group orders easy and fun.

I worked on a small piece of our Groups controller and some of the basic forms for creating and editing groups. This post is part one of two. In part one, I’m explaining how I installed a timepicker for the group forms. In part two, I’ll explain how I created a custom form helper to normalize the states input for user addresses.

How Programming Is Changing The Way I View Everything

Lately, I’ve been dreaming of programming. In my dreams, I’m breaking down problems, explaining them in metaphors. It reminds me of my dreams in Chinese while I studied abroad in Beijing my junion year of college. Living in China changed how I saw everything… for example I will never, ever take Modern Plumbing for granted again.

In this post, I share 3 observations on how learning Ruby these past few weeks has already profoundly changed the way I think.

Why am I at the Flatiron School?

While I liked my old job as the Interactive Designer/Developer for the New York City Economic Development Corporation, I was ready for a change. I’m pretty sure if I had to design just one more email template or tweak one more WordPress theme, I was gonna go crazy. I fell out of love with design at my old job. Then I encountered two pieces of inspiration that helped me find my way…