grace teng

Advice for Le Wagon Web Dev Bootcamp grads

Congrats, you're done with Le Wagon's Web Development bootcamp. You have 360 hours of classroom time, three Rails applications, and zero professional software development experience. What's next? Le Wagon maintains its own career playbook, but depending on where you are and what your goals are, you may find yourself struggling

MCIT

Applying to MCIT

I enrolled in the University of Pennsylvania's online Master of Computer and Information Technology program in Spring 2021 and since then, a number of people have reached out to ask me about applying to MCIT. Since most potential applicants have the same questions and I find myself repeating the same

Spring

Spring Pet Clinic: Things I Still Don't Understand

I picked up the Spring Pet Clinic project again, and I'm considering it done (for now). My documentary professor in college used to say that "films aren't finished, they're abandoned", because you can keep working on a personal project endlessly and never "finish" unless you make

Book Review

Book Review: Never Split The Difference

One of the last things I did in 2021 was read Chris Voss's excellent book, Never Split The Difference. The book left such an impression that I decided I needed to take notes and to share what I learned from it during the weekly beach showcase. I've made a copy

Testing

Thinking About Test Frameworks

Yesterday, I wrote a post about why and how to write tests, inspired by my recent involvement in a social impact project. The gist of it is that the key purpose of automated tests is to provide fast feedback. I ended the previous post with a remark that the need

Testing

Thinking About Testing

Over the course of my last social impact project, I found myself examining many of my own implicit assumptions about testing. I'd like to explore some of them today and share what I've learned. What is a test? This is a simple question, but the first time I heard it

Ruby

Scraping With Nokogiri

Thinking about little things that I've done or played with on the beach that I am at liberty to share, here's a fun little one using Nokogiri to solve an entirely self-inflicted problem. I purchased Adrian Cantrill's AWS Certified Solutions Architect Associate course and wanted to break it down into

Spring

Spring Pet Clinic: So Far

I'm putting together my own implementation of the Spring Pet Clinic, which is a project by the Spring team to demonstrate the capabilities of Spring. As a relative newcomer to Spring and to paradigms common in Java, I'm trying to get underneath the covers of Spring and at the same

JavaScript

Handling date strings and timezones in JavaScript

Here is a simple scenario: you're writing client-side JavaScript. You query an API with a city name, and it returns with a bunch of useful information about the city, including the timezone, in this format: { ... city: "New York", timezone: -18000, ... } You want to use this information to display

Python

Python cheatsheet for Ruby devs

Common operations translated from Ruby to Python.

Computer Science

Thinking About Computation

In the beginning were zeroes and ones, and the zeroes and ones were with Boolean operators, and the zeroes and ones and Boolean operators were two-element Boolean algebra. All computation was made through Boolean algebra, and without Boolean algebra was not any computation made that was made. There is only

Le Wagon

Le Wagon: Macrotery and Macrotery Redux

See Macrotery Redux Github Repo for Macrotery Redux See Macrotery (warning: optimised for mobile, not desktop friendly) Github Repo for Macrotery About Macrotery Macrotery is a project that originated as a final project at Le Wagon batch #454 (Singapore), by Allen Chung (allenchungtw), Stephen Das (steevesd), Zack Xu (konfs), and

Le Wagon

Le Wagon: Rent-a-Pokémon and Rent-a-Pokémon Redux

See Rent-a-Pokémon Redux Github Repo for Rent-a-Pokémon Redux Rent-a-Pokémon Github Repo for Rent-a-Pokémon About Rent-a-Pokemon At Le Wagon, every student builds an Airbnb clone in five days as part of a team. The Airbnb project is the first time during the Le Wagon bootcamp when we work in groups and

Le Wagon

Le Wagon: Mister Cocktail

See Mister Cocktail Github Repo for Mister Cocktail About Mister Cocktail Mister Cocktail comes at the end of week 6 of Le Wagon's Full-Stack Web Development bootcamp, and it is the first chance for students to synthesise everything we've learnt into a single Rails project. The assignment is simple: build

Book Review

Working Stiff by Dr. Judy Melinek and T.J. Mitchell

I wanted to learn about human anatomy. It’s a running joke in my family that we all sucked at biology in school, and dropped the subject like a hot potato as soon as we could. As I’ve become more and more interested in health and fitness, however, I

Speedrunning

Speedrunning and the Scientific Method

In a previous post, I wrote about speedrunning and I asked myself why I found it so enthralling. Well, I should clarify that. I’ve watched a couple of Pokémon speedrunners grinding runs, which was supremely uninteresting. I watched pokeguy84 swear and reset repeatedly, and dropped in on an Exarion

Education

Learning To Read Science

I’ve been trying, with mixed success, to reduce the amount of plastic waste I generate. Spending months in Freiburg will do that to you. So imagine my joy at seeing this headline in the Guardian this week: Scientists accidentally create mutant enzyme that eats plastic bottles (The Guardian, 16

Speedrunning

Very preliminary thoughts and questions on speedrunning

I’ve only recently discovered speedrunning. It’s a fairly obscure corner of gaming culture, so here’s a quick explanation that Kosmicd12, current holder of the Super Mario Bros. world record, gave to FiveThirtyEight: The goal of speedrunning is to go fast.Yup, that’s all there is to

Theory

Entertainment On Steroids

I got back into the gym for the first time in a long time this week. I enjoy powerlifting, so even though I’m not very good at it (yet) I’m already looking forward to my next gym session. In the meantime, I’ve been watching replays of the

Abstraction

Visual Abstraction: Velázquez, Picasso and Klee

Let’s take a look today at a section of a very famous painting: The Infanta Margarita Teresa from Las Meninas, Diego Velázquez. 1656, oil on canvas. Museo del Prado, Madrid. Full, high-resolution picture available on the Prado Museum's website.This is part of Diego Velázquez’s 1656 masterpiece, Las

Abstraction

Writing Systems: Signs, Icons, Symbols and Abstraction

In my last post, I wrote about abstraction in computer engineering. In today’s post, I want to start laying the foundation for looking at abstraction in two other fields, in visual arts and in linguistics. To do that, we’ll start in a place where the two fields overlap:

Abstraction

Layers of Abstraction

The essence of abstractions is preserving information that is relevant in a given context, and forgetting information that is irrelevant in that context. – John V. Guttag (from Introduction to Computation and Programming Using Python)I started learning programming when I was 10, when I walked into my father’s study

Undergrad

Development of the Catalan periphrastic past tense construction

This essay was written in the Fall 2012 semester as part of the Spanish Indo-European Syntax course at New York University, which was then numbered LING-UA 36. In the Catalan language, there are three important periphrastic constructions that can be formed with the auxiliary verb anar (“to go”). One is

Undergrad

Lo grotesco en El día de la bestia

This short essay was written in the Spring 2012 semester as part of the Spanish Culture Through Cinema course at New York University, which is now numbered SPAN-UA 9994. Según Mijail Bajtín, lo que más define lo grotesco es “la degradación, o sea la transferencia al plano material y corporal

Undergrad

Writing the Essay: Beethoven

This essay was written in the Spring 2011 semester as part of the Writing The Essay: The World Through Art course at New York University, which is now numbered ASPP-UT 2. “We are going to try to perform for you today a curious and rather difficult experiment, “ says Leonard Bernstein