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Sempervirens Falls in Big Basin State Park. Photo by Ethan Clapham

A few months ago I joined a meetup called Nerds for Nature, which brings together technical people with a passion for the environment. While there I met the Communications Manager for the Sempervirens Fund. He mentioned needed some help with their website and I jumped on the opportunity.

While I’m still knee deep in job searching I wanted to get more experience and this came with the added bonus of volunteering for a great mission. I hike under the California redwoods that Sempervirens Fund helps to protect regularly so the cause is near and dear to my heart.

My first project was creating a page about banana slugs, which are one of my favorite forest creatures. I had so much fun putting together the page and learning more about these slimy guys. You can see my work here: That Slug Life

Photo credit: Santa Cruz Hilltromper

Sempervirens Fund uses WordPress with the Seven Stars theme. I had to get more comfortable using the Blox Content Builder, which looks like an intuitive wizard, but doesn’t seem to behave as I expected. I fumbled around a bit and found little info on the web to help. I eventually got my page layout setup and then just used the classic editor to add my content.

I was given a couple of images, a little text and the two videos to embed, but it was up to me to put those all together and add more info. I really enjoyed researching these crazy creatures and thought about the kind of information I would want to see if I was visiting the page.

Because I obviously want people to search for banana slugs and find the page I also implemented a few SEO techniques. I read Moz.com: Beginners Guide to SEO to get me started. I also signed up for Google Adwords so I could test my keywords. I had been wanting to learn more about SEO and this was a great introduction.

Volunteering with Sempervirens Fund has not only been fun, but an awesome experience in preparation for my career in web development. I’m looking forward to my next assignment which will be on mountain lions!

I completed my bootcamp just before Christmas of 2015 and since then have kept myself pretty busy continuing to learn. Once you start to learn a language, framework, a technique, etc you start to realize just how much more there is to learn. It can be overwhelming and one of the reasons I chose to do a bootcamp which ensured that I focused on the fundamentals to get me started. Now it’s up to me to continue on the path Coding Dojo prepped me for.

In order to keep learning I’ve used a number of tools, such as:

• Khan Academy to brush up on the DOM API
• Interview Cake to improve my problem solving skills
• Reading Javascript the Good Parts to hone my JS knowledge.

Another great resource has been attending workshops held by the Girl Develop It organization.

I’ve been to two workshops where not only did I learn valuable information, but I also got to meet other women in the area working on their own coding adventure.

Accessibility Workshop

The first workshop I attended was on web accessibility and ensuring my work would be available to users of all abilities. Some of the material covered included:

• Understanding how users of differing abilities may interact with your site
• Implementing Accessibly Rich Internet Applications (ARIA)
• Using tools such as WAVE to assess your application accessibility
• How screen readers interpret your page content

It was an eye-opening workshop and an excellent lesson in making sure I consider all users when developing my applications. The logo above is from The Accessible Icon Project.

Unit Testing with Jasmine

Unit testing is extremely important in development and is (or should be) a requirement for all development jobs. Unfortunately my bootcamp didn’t cover unit testing in my course work so this workshop was invaluable to me. Using the Jasmine documentation and a game developed by the GDI instructors we learned:

• Principles of unit testing and its value
• How to approach behavior-driven testing
• Setting up and running our test specs
• Eventually completing our game code with zero test failures

Like the other workshop, the material was well-organized and the instructors were very knowledgeable. We paired up with fellow students to work together and there were plenty of instructors to help with questions. I’m no longer intimidated in setting up my tests and look forward to implementing what I learned on my next application.

Next week I’ll be attending an “Algorithm and Interview Prep” workshop held by Women Who Code SF. Practicing for technical interviews is always valuable and I’m really looking forward to attending my first WWC-SF event.

Even before I became a developer I was interested in hackathons. They sounded so creative, intense and fun. Now that I have some development skills I decided I wanted to experience one for myself.

I signed up for the Developer Week Hackathon and showed up Saturday morning by myself. I noticed two women sitting nearby and worked up the courage to ask them if they were looking for team mates. They could not have been nicer and immediately welcomed me to the team. They were both ruby developers so I said I could work on the front-end.

We discussed a few ideas and settled on using the IBM Watson API which can provide personality insights based on a writing sample. Initially thinking about another dating site my thoughts went from finding the perfect mate to finding the perfect pet and “Finding Fido” was born!

Finding Fido uses a user’s personality insight score to match them with their perfect dog breeds. It then shows the user Petfinder profiles of actual dogs available for adoption. You can try our app here: http://finding-fido.herokuapp.com/

While my team mates were heads down on the back-end I set to work on our front-end. Initially we planned to use jQuery UI to tab between our user profile and match pages. After wrestling with the styling and thinking through the user experience more, we scrapped using tabs. I used Twitter Bootstrap to help with the styling, especially for the tables. Eventually we gained another team mate who also helped me take my single html file and break it up to work within the Sinatra framework.

We pitched our completed app to IBM for the competition and they seemed to really like it. Unfortunately we didn’t win, but I was in it for the experience and not the prizes so I was pleased nonetheless.

For me this experience was invaluable. Since I had been a remote student at Coding Dojo I was used to having to develop solutions on my own. This helped me become more self sufficient, but I missed out on working within a team. Working with my hackathon team put skills to work that I really only exercised in theory prior, like managing merge conflicts. I learned more about Ruby syntax, how Sinatra apps work and deploying to Heroku.

My favorite part was enjoying the camaraderie of working with my team and getting to know them better. I feel more confident in my skills, more inspired to create new applications and more motivated to work with other developers. All in all it was really an amazing experience and I can’t wait for my next hackathon!