Last night I went to my first meetup with the group, Build to Code, in Manhattan. I was a pair programming event where we learned about asynchronous JavaScript. I've never done paired programming before, but I thought it was a good experience. It was good practice for me to communicate to someone how to solve a problem. I think if I keep working that way I can really improve my technical communication skills.

I learned about how javascript interacts with the Web Browser API and about the event loop. We looked at a couple examples with queueing messages using the setTimeout function. I was surprised to hear about the callback function from setTimeout wasn't added to the callstack until all of the lines in javascript finished running. But when I learned that the event loop had a queue I began to understand how javascript, a synchronous language, can work in a web browser.

I met a few people at the meetup. I think I particually connected with one woman who had just finished a bootcamp called Flatiron. I was surprisingly comfortable meeting people at the event. The instructor was particually friendly and approachable. I would like to go to events that are more "networking oriented" in the future.

As a bonus, I learned about some more online tools to help practice my programming

• Javascript 30
• Geeks for geeks
• ReactiveX
• MDN
• Code academy
• DevDocs.io
• CSX/csx.codesmith.io

Happy new year everyone! I want to keep this post brief. But I want to give myself the time to reflect on everything that I’ve accomplished in 2017. Particularly what I’ve done since graduation. I’m very happy that I’ve moved to Brooklyn and reestablish old relationships. I started out with an internship at the art galley in Lower East Side, Con Artist Collective. The project that I picked up there was removing their website from Shopify. I like calling the project “Bye Bye Shopify”. I want to post more about it later. But I learned a lot of PHP from the project and was able to create a basic content management system using the file structure of the website. It was really cool working there and so far has been my best work experience. Plus I got to use the space to work on painting commissions and personal projects (just not as much as I wanted to). Soon after leaving the Con Artist Collective team, I found freelance work at a doctor’s private practice. It was not work web developing, but it gave me some perspective on freelancing for a variety of jobs.

Since I started working, making the time to complete checkpoints from the Bloc curriculum has been much more difficult. I’ve had to pace down, but since the new year I have been much better at scheduling time to work on the curriculum. I hope that I can continue the pace that I am at. As I find more and more work, I want to be disciplined by always giving enough time to my school work.

I’m still working as an artist. I showed my first painting at Con Artist Collective just a new weeks ago. I’ve done many commissions since graduation and I still have prospective work that I’m very excited about. My main goal is to not stop my momentum with my artwork as I grow into my career.

Hope you have had a pleasant 2017 (regardless of the political climate). Stay strong in 2018.

This week is my third week working in Lower East Side Manhattan at Con Artist Collective. I came across their internship program when I was still living in the Greater Philadelphia Area and was looking for a place that I could make art. I saw that they offered their venue to interns while they work there, so I joined. When I first visited the place I was drawn to the large, wooden box in the middle of the floor that covered in graffiti and doodles. The general manager told me that they called the space their office and when he took me inside there was a giant unicorn head made of aluminum foil. I had just seen the place for a few seconds, and that was when I fell in love with the space.

I started working there a week after I moved to Brooklyn. I jumped onto their development projects for their website and online forum that they call, CAMP. It is still towards the beginning of the internship, so most of work I have been doing has been learning how they manage their current website, understanding their future goals, and creating mockups for future versions of their online platforms. One of my goals is to brush-up on design, so having the opportunity to create mockups for an organization has been good for me. It’s not something that I have the time to do while I’m taking online classes. It has also given me practice in developing for a larger organization. I have had almost full control over most of my previous projects, so it becomes kind of fun to think about what a client/organization needs or wants and being able to come up with solutions that accomplish their goals. It’s nice to not have to think about every single aspect of an application and work on a team.

I have just begun working on a functional demo for their public website. After doing a lot of designing, it’s nice to be able to code again. I'm better at programming than web design. Haha.

Going into Bloc, I was admittedly a little apprehensive. I didn’t know if it was the best idea for me to jump into online classes right after getting a bachelor’s. At the time, I was dedicating most of my energy into painting and creating art and wanted to experiment working as a freelance artist. I thought, if anything, it would be a way to help me focus on developing my programming skills.

The more I work through the projects that are a part of the curriculum, the more excited I get about the program. I love to create and I am learning more than I expected. I just finished working through the first two projects that focus on the front end. At first it was a little difficult for me to comprehend all of the components of Angular, such as the types of services etc. However, after I was able to complete two projects using Angular, I felt like I had a better grasp of the framework. I think it is a good accomplishment considering I’ve only used it for a few weeks so far. I’m even taking what I’ve learn at block and using it in my new internship to build a dynamic website.

Since I’ve already learned so much so far, I am excited to move on to learning more about back-end development. Most of my prior experience before starting Bloc had been in front-end developing, so I think the next module will be more intense for me. I look forward to the challenge. I enjoy learning about web development and I like having the opportunity to take what I learn and apply it to other things that I’m doing.

I didn’t always think that I wanted to be a web developer. But I guess not many people have. My decision to work towards becoming one just started to piece together while I was in college. I graduated from Lehigh University in May 2017 with a degree in computer science, but even after I graduated I felt like I still had a lot to learn. Most of the projects that I had worked on gave me the opportunity to problem-solve and construct algorithms, but I thought that I was much more interested in human-computer interaction. I thought much more about design, usability, and visual appeal than I felt a lot of my peers did. While I loved the challenge of writing algorithms that would solve a problem, I didn’t have much incentive to program if the final product wasn’t something that a user would be excited to interact with.

I worked as a student web developer in college. I learned a lot there, but more than anything I gained exposure to a different side of computer science and coding. It showed me that programmers can work with clients to develop a site that not only worked but was something that the client was happy with. I loved the idea of programming to make content easy to navigate, accessible, and beautiful. I also liked the idea of the popularity of sites being totally dictated by unknown users. Content on the web had to be usable and easy to navigate for anybody and not just the people that created a site. More importantly, users needed to be engaged at all times in order to maintain their attention. I wanted to work on programming problems that were constantly incorporated with a user’s perspective and valued design as away to solve a problem. The being of my senior year of college was when I decided that becoming a Web Developer was going to be my goal when I graduated.

I made the decision to join Bloc not long before I graduated college and I started the Web Developer Track at the end of June that year. It’s been a lot of time commitment for me, but it’s been well worth it. The program has helped to guide me through learning the technology and thinking about my future career goals. It can be difficult sometimes. I had been doing a lot of painting while participating in the program and doing freelance work as well. On top of that I moved to Brooklyn, NY and started an internship at an art gallery/ collective. Even a couple month into to program, I know that this is just the beginning of my new journey.