Travel, Food, & Software Development While Living Abroad
I’m not sure who’s following along, but if you are I want to share a quick update! In 2023 I started ProsperQR! This is the culmination of 15 years of work. Learning eCommerce, learning software engineering, and learning marketing and business. I spent nearly a decade working in large tech companies to learn everything I could about how to write good software, to how to lead large…
Hey everyone, just an announcement. I’m discontinuing this blog, and you can follow along at my new blog! Lifestyle Hacks for Web Developers - blog.nomadwong.com Looking forward to sharing with everyone!
My review of App Academy, 3 years after graduation. Tl;DR I recommend it. I learned a ton, made amazing friends, and had career success as a web developer after the bootcamp.
TL;DR I learned to code, and networked with other aspiring Digital Nomads. Useful links near the end of the post. Escaping Desk Work 5 years ago I was sitting in my office with no work to do, and wondering why I was still in my cubicle doing absolutely nothing. I’ve always been one to head towards my long-term goals, and because of that - I’m impatient when it comes to wasting my time with…
Today marks 2 years since I started App Academy! I can’t believe what a wild ride it has been. Since then, I’ve learned so much more about programming and it really has become the centerpiece of my life. My career, my shower-thoughts, my friends, and my future aspirations all involve web development in one way or another. It’s amazing, not only did completing App Academy jumpstart my career, I…
I’ve been missing a few blog posts lately, it’s not because I’ve lost interest, I’ve just been so engrossed in all this new material we’ve been doing, I’ve been forgetting to write posts. The posts do feel like a chore at times, but I think it’s a good way to recap the day, I think it will be valuable to review all the material we covered and the…
Today we learned bootstrap. And all I can say is that I’m completely blown away. Bootstrap is a framework that allows you to right CSS and JavaScript to style your websites quickly and efficiently. And it’s absolutely amazing. For years I’ve been writing all my own CSS by code, working diligently to get every little div aligned perfectly down to the pixel. Apparently, Bootstrap…
I can’t believe it’s already our last week of pure curriculum at App Academy. It’s been a wild ride and I’ve learned so much. And at the same time, we’re only half way through the course. Next we have two weeks of building our final projects, and then three weeks of job preparation. This week is completely dedicated to Backbone.js which is going to take control of our…
Today we learned all about jQuery. We built a TicTacToe game, towers of Hanoi, and a snake game. I would put these up, but they’re not nearly as cool as the Asteroids we built yesterday. They were really cool projects though and we learned all about how to use event handlers in jQuery to manipulate the DOM. I can see how powerful jQuery can be when working on large scale dynamic web pages.…
All I have to say is: http://andrewwong.io/asteroids/ . Visit it. Play it. Be in awe. After just 3 days of learning JavaScript we made a freakin’ asteroids clone. And me and my partner went above and beyond and made our ship the USS Enterprise, and the asteroids really cool looking rocks. Put that all over a nice space background, and you have the best asteroids ever made (in 5 hours).…
Today we programmed Tic Tac Toe again, as well as several other exercises. We wanted to explore the asynchronous nature of JavaScript, and were able to do a lot of things we did before in a brand new way. This was really interesting and really fun. It’s amazing how differently JavaScript behaves compared to Ruby. Check out our project here: http://andrewwong.io/tictactoe.html
Today was the first day of week 6. I can’t believe we’ve come so far. We started learning Ruby throughout weeks 1 and 2. Then we did SQL during week 3. Finally, weeks 4 and 5 were dedicated to Rails. And now, our last two weeks, 6-8 will be dedicated to JavaScript. And then it’s time to work on our final projects! I can’t wait to start our final projects, but first…
Today, we built a Reddit clone. It was a lot of fun, we used everything we know about Rails, including some of the more advanced things we’ve been learning. We also built it in a TDD style, implementing rspec tests for all of our models. The most interesting feature of the day was creating the infinitely nested comments and subcomments that reddit has. We used a recursive partial nested…
Today we had our Authentication assessment. We had two and a half hours to build an application featuring a full authentication system, with encrypted passwords, and login/logout, and registration features. The app also had the ability for users to add posts, and comments to each post. This is the hardest assessment in the App Academy curriculum, and I’m happy to say that I passed with a…
Today we built Rails Lite. It was a very interesting project. It was what some call “metaprogramming”. What we did was build all the extra things that ruby provides you, the associations, the routes, the views, the controllers, and the parameters. We even built the WEBrick server, and configured it to handle RESTful requests. This was a very helpful and insightful project, because we…
Today was an interesting project. We wrote a Google+ clone. This involved a lot of work with nested forms. According to our teachers, we now know everything there is to know in Rails. Crazy in just a week and a half we know pretty much everything there is to do in Rails. Now does this mean I’m an expert and should go off and get a six figure job? Well… not yet. I’ve still got a…
Today I built an app called MyTunes. It’s kind of like iTunes, except it’s based online. Users can add bands, albums, and tracks, and add personal notes to their tracks. I learned a lot doing this project, especially in creating authentication - login forms and registration, and also managing my routes and controllers in Rails. So far, every project we’ve done have been one day…
Today was a fun day. We learned all about how to authenticate users. We learned the security issues related to it, and how to make sure our login system is robust, and can’t be hacked. Check out me and my partner’s app that we made today: http://morning-thicket-8409.herokuapp.com/ and view the code on github: https://github.com/arwong09/99cats It doesn’t look exciting, but the…
Today we learned all about views - the third piece in the MVC framework. The views are a lot of fun because they are the part that actually let’s us see something when we view the website with a web browser. Today we built a site similar to 99dresses. I’m a little bit conflicted, I halfway feel that I’m really understanding everything and on top of my studies. On the other hand,…
Headshot. : tubaloren : (A reference above to all of my fellow Counterstrike gamers). Music: Kenny Garrett Live in New York (YouTube video) I got the boot from App Academy last week, hence the lack of updates. It was very unexpected. Long story. However, I am back in LA safely, with a whirlwind of events that took… Dude man, we miss you!! Keep the blog going, you’ll have readers here. We’ve been…