Just a quick update on what’s been up over the past week:

• CA Hackathon #1
• Demo Day Prep
• CSS/HTML Learning
• Dev Learning

So this past weekend was my first ever Hackathon! Long story short, teams of 3-5 get together to work on an app idea for 48 hours. Friday night everyone pitched their ideas and Sunday afternoon we saw presentations of what everyone had accomplished.

I worked on a project called HashPage – essentially, the app digs into the Twitter API to help a user make better use of their #hashtags. On a user’s HashPage, they are able to set 3 to 6 hashtags that they plan to use in their Tweets. For example, I might set my hashes as #NHL, #CodeAcademy, #Rails, #MindPuck and #Chicago. Now that I have set these hashtags, I have incentive to categorize my Tweets using these tags. On my HashPage my Tweets would should up in sorted lists according to the pre-determined hashtags.

I worked with a great team featuring Rails wizards @DMWoodall @fangedparakeet, design master @ebinion and two others. I coded my first ever webpage design, an awesome experience although it quickly got scrapped in favor of a design from a much more experienced coder. Not to worry though, I learned a ton. While we didn’t get the Twitter API totally mastered, we came very close. HashPage is now a continuing project that a few of us are developing on the side.

If HashPage is on the side, what’s in the middle? DEMO DAY BABY!

So I decided to put in my idea for Demo Day… I have been developing the concept for a while and am in the process of putting a team together to help me build it. So far I have @jgladfelter on board, which is awesome. Looking forward to rounding out the team with some talented individuals.

What’s the idea? I won’t spoil the surprise, but here is a teaser:

StreamPass
“An internet ticketing platform that allows consumers to buy access to live streams / streaming services on a game-by-game or event-by-event basis.”

That’s all you get for now… get excited to see a prototype go live in t-minus 5 weeks!

Class Learning

In yesterday’s HTML/CSS class we went through Lesson Five of Shay’s beginner’s guide. I learned a lot about making your designs come to life with background images. Some of these concepts were pretty tricky though… definitely need to put some practice hours in.

On the Dev side, we had an awesome class this morning. First we had appearances from Code Academy mentors Dave Hoover (Groupon) and Elliott (tech recruiter). These guys shared a ton of great tips for getting into the development workforce – really inspiring to hear great stories about people realizing their dreams with the help of Code Academy. They also stressed that networking can be a powerful tool, but it is what you make of it. Be yourself, get out there and make those connections – nobody is going to do it for you, but you have the power to connect with anyone you want to. This inspired me to create a list of companies that I would really love to work for… the list is still in beta, but as soon as Code Academy is done you can bet I’m going on a mission to get face time with people at these companies.

Quote of the Day from Dave Hoover: “Progression Over Perfection”

After these speeches we really started partying on some Rails. Here is our list of topics for this week:

• User Stories
• Model Associations
• View Helpers
• Cookies
• User Accounts
• Filters

We touched on most of these in class today – basically, we learned the basic framework for creating users on your website. I absolutely loved this class, one of my favorites so far. @jeffcohen had a particularly awesome explanation of browser cookies that made it super easy to understand. Model associations also started to sink in a lot better – having a firm grip on these associations will be crucial for the success of my app.

Looking forward to class on Thursday and to the journey ahead for StreamPass.

Thanks for reading. Cheers!