Mentors, Project 2.0, and other assorted musings
I find it amusing now that I thought this blog would be a mostly-daily affair going into the fellowship. It became apparent quickly that there's way too much to take care of to worry about writing a blog post every day! But I think it's important to do it at least a few times a week.
That said, it's been a little over a week since I wrote a post. It's been a crazy-busy past week! Were I to try and summarize everything, I'd be sitting here writing well into the morning's lecture & lab. So I'll just give you, o reader, the bullet points.
Last Wednesday, we had our mentor mixer--the night on which we all met our mentors for the program. These people are typically folks who work in some capacity in software engineering, or have in the past. My mentors are: Faith-Anne, who is a consultant for a company called Pariveda Solutions; David, who is a senior software engineer at Apple; and Steve, who's the co-founder & CEO of Reddit. I'm incredibly lucky to have these folks "on my team" (as it were). Realistically, I'm going to start meeting with them in Week 6 of the fellowship, as the first 5 weeks are insane with lectures and labs. Once we hit Week 6, we'll have a little bit more flexibility in terms of having to be at school--as it will be predominantly time spent working on our individual projects, if I need to leave school and go meet up with my mentors off-site, that's do-able at that point. Faith-Anne is out in Walnut Creek--about a 20 minute drive from my house, so not far. David is down in Cupertino, which may mean some Skype meetings, but I'm cool with driving down to meet in person, and that way I can make an afternoon/evening of it, and have dinner with some of my friends down that way that I likely wouldn't have much of a chance to see otherwise during the fellowship. And Reddit is 2 blocks away from Hackbright, so I'll be able to meet with Steve either here or at Reddit (which I totally want to do, I love visiting and checking out tech companies!--such inspiration that further drives me to hustle and become the best software engineer I can). Really looking forward to working with all three of them--they're going to be an invaluable resource while I'm working on my project, and in navigating the journey of finding myself a proper job out of the fellowship.
I'll touch on some things in my next post about where I'd like to see myself in terms of the companies I'd be interested in working for, but right now, I'll mention my project. I had to scrap Idea 1.0. It was really too much of a front end-project, would have been incredibly involved in terms of math-y stuff...in so many words, it wasn't the right project for this fellowship. Not something I'm abandoning...just something to put on the back burner as a personal project somewhere down the road when I have the time and skills to make it happen.
Before I get to Project Concept 2.0, I'm going to back up for a minute to last Friday. There was a MASSIVE power outage in San Francisco--something like 90,000 people lost power. It went out not long before the day was about to start at school, and obviously this threw a huge wrench in the works, being that we (obviously) need power to run the projector/laptops/etc. for lectures, and the computers in the labs. We ended up doing an impromptu study hall on classes on whiteboards while we waited to see if the power would be restored anytime soon. It was incredibly difficult to concentrate for a number of reasons--first of all, it just threw off the routine, and routine/schedule is something that's been very important to me during my time in the fellowship. Second, I was feeling rather terrible about my project, as the meeting with my advisor a few days previously had basically yielded the conclusion reached above that I wouldn't be able to do the project the way I'd envisioned it--and I wasn't thrilled about the suggestions my advisor had in terms of how I could modify the project. Nothing wrong with them, it just wasn't something I could see myself doing and being truly enthusiastic about. Over the next few days, I kinda let things stew, and by Friday morning, I was feeling pretty awful about it and coming to the realization that I probably needed to find a new project idea...and fast. I ended up having a chat with Leslie (our cohort manager), who is the brainstormer of project ideas (as per her reputation, haha). I talked to her about various issues I was having surrounding my project...I told her some of my other personal interests---one of them being scifi--and she mentioned that one gal a couple cohorts ago had done a project that was a comparison/character/affiliation linking of the characters in the Marvel cinematic universe. The came the lightbulb moment--I can do this for Doctor Who! I looked up the Marvel project, took a look at the stack/code, and this is something I can definitely do, and will fulfill the requirements for the project. Not that it's going to be easy (that's not the point of the fellowship!), but it's achievable. For the record, I will not be doing this for all Doctor Who characters going all the way back to 1963...that would be WAY too much to deal with for a project to build in 5 weeks! I'm going to use a dataset for the revamp which started in 2005 up to the present. It'll involve character connections for Series 1-10, as well as all 4 seasons of Torchwood (which, as anyone who knows me well will tell you, is a borderline obsession of mine). More details to come in a later post...this weekend I need to write out a general layman's description of the project, make a list of the tools/APIs/etc. that I'll be using, and map out the user flow. In a way, this will be one of the hardest parts of the project--just figuring out what I (at least initially) want it to look like and how I want it to work. (Getting started was also one of the hardest parts of being a classical performer--getting in the practice room, putting my clarinet together, and starting to play.)
It's lunchtime, and I still need to eat something, so I'll leave it there for now. (I'll leave a discussion of last weekend's assessments and my semi-epic CSS fail for another post, lol.) Just want to reiterate how glad I am I had that chat with Leslie. I was feeling so awful about the project last week...it was nice to go into the weekend feeling a sense of relief that I now have a solid project idea that's realistic, and that I'll be enthusiastic about.
That said, it's been a little over a week since I wrote a post. It's been a crazy-busy past week! Were I to try and summarize everything, I'd be sitting here writing well into the morning's lecture & lab. So I'll just give you, o reader, the bullet points.
Last Wednesday, we had our mentor mixer--the night on which we all met our mentors for the program. These people are typically folks who work in some capacity in software engineering, or have in the past. My mentors are: Faith-Anne, who is a consultant for a company called Pariveda Solutions; David, who is a senior software engineer at Apple; and Steve, who's the co-founder & CEO of Reddit. I'm incredibly lucky to have these folks "on my team" (as it were). Realistically, I'm going to start meeting with them in Week 6 of the fellowship, as the first 5 weeks are insane with lectures and labs. Once we hit Week 6, we'll have a little bit more flexibility in terms of having to be at school--as it will be predominantly time spent working on our individual projects, if I need to leave school and go meet up with my mentors off-site, that's do-able at that point. Faith-Anne is out in Walnut Creek--about a 20 minute drive from my house, so not far. David is down in Cupertino, which may mean some Skype meetings, but I'm cool with driving down to meet in person, and that way I can make an afternoon/evening of it, and have dinner with some of my friends down that way that I likely wouldn't have much of a chance to see otherwise during the fellowship. And Reddit is 2 blocks away from Hackbright, so I'll be able to meet with Steve either here or at Reddit (which I totally want to do, I love visiting and checking out tech companies!--such inspiration that further drives me to hustle and become the best software engineer I can). Really looking forward to working with all three of them--they're going to be an invaluable resource while I'm working on my project, and in navigating the journey of finding myself a proper job out of the fellowship.
I'll touch on some things in my next post about where I'd like to see myself in terms of the companies I'd be interested in working for, but right now, I'll mention my project. I had to scrap Idea 1.0. It was really too much of a front end-project, would have been incredibly involved in terms of math-y stuff...in so many words, it wasn't the right project for this fellowship. Not something I'm abandoning...just something to put on the back burner as a personal project somewhere down the road when I have the time and skills to make it happen.
Before I get to Project Concept 2.0, I'm going to back up for a minute to last Friday. There was a MASSIVE power outage in San Francisco--something like 90,000 people lost power. It went out not long before the day was about to start at school, and obviously this threw a huge wrench in the works, being that we (obviously) need power to run the projector/laptops/etc. for lectures, and the computers in the labs. We ended up doing an impromptu study hall on classes on whiteboards while we waited to see if the power would be restored anytime soon. It was incredibly difficult to concentrate for a number of reasons--first of all, it just threw off the routine, and routine/schedule is something that's been very important to me during my time in the fellowship. Second, I was feeling rather terrible about my project, as the meeting with my advisor a few days previously had basically yielded the conclusion reached above that I wouldn't be able to do the project the way I'd envisioned it--and I wasn't thrilled about the suggestions my advisor had in terms of how I could modify the project. Nothing wrong with them, it just wasn't something I could see myself doing and being truly enthusiastic about. Over the next few days, I kinda let things stew, and by Friday morning, I was feeling pretty awful about it and coming to the realization that I probably needed to find a new project idea...and fast. I ended up having a chat with Leslie (our cohort manager), who is the brainstormer of project ideas (as per her reputation, haha). I talked to her about various issues I was having surrounding my project...I told her some of my other personal interests---one of them being scifi--and she mentioned that one gal a couple cohorts ago had done a project that was a comparison/character/affiliation linking of the characters in the Marvel cinematic universe. The came the lightbulb moment--I can do this for Doctor Who! I looked up the Marvel project, took a look at the stack/code, and this is something I can definitely do, and will fulfill the requirements for the project. Not that it's going to be easy (that's not the point of the fellowship!), but it's achievable. For the record, I will not be doing this for all Doctor Who characters going all the way back to 1963...that would be WAY too much to deal with for a project to build in 5 weeks! I'm going to use a dataset for the revamp which started in 2005 up to the present. It'll involve character connections for Series 1-10, as well as all 4 seasons of Torchwood (which, as anyone who knows me well will tell you, is a borderline obsession of mine). More details to come in a later post...this weekend I need to write out a general layman's description of the project, make a list of the tools/APIs/etc. that I'll be using, and map out the user flow. In a way, this will be one of the hardest parts of the project--just figuring out what I (at least initially) want it to look like and how I want it to work. (Getting started was also one of the hardest parts of being a classical performer--getting in the practice room, putting my clarinet together, and starting to play.)
It's lunchtime, and I still need to eat something, so I'll leave it there for now. (I'll leave a discussion of last weekend's assessments and my semi-epic CSS fail for another post, lol.) Just want to reiterate how glad I am I had that chat with Leslie. I was feeling so awful about the project last week...it was nice to go into the weekend feeling a sense of relief that I now have a solid project idea that's realistic, and that I'll be enthusiastic about.
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