Vickerdoodle

thoughts, opinions, and random arts & crafts

Technology

RSpec Resources

January 13, 2019 · 3 Comments

As some of you know, I recently started an apprenticeship as a Ruby on Rails software engineer. I came into this new job with very little experience in the backend, let alone Ruby, and absolutely no experience with testing. My manager has been incredible with providing me with opportunities and resources to learn (I’m now on a full time team at the company!)

One of the things that she was very adamant about was that we needed to be testing. Not only were we learning how to code an app in Ruby on Rails, but we also needed to be able to write tests for our code. When I first started out, I found that writing tests seemed even harder than actually building the app we were working on. I’d knock out the actual app code in a day or two, but then it’d take almost a week to figure out how to write the right test to make sure that code was right. At the time, it was a little frustrating and I often questioned what the point was. But now that I’m working in a larger company application, one with a codebase that’s touched every day by many other developers, I’ve gained a real appreciation for writing tests.

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Life

New Years in China

March 18, 2018 · 4 Comments

This post is a little late, but better late than never! In February, I spent Lunar New Year with my family in China. We did quite a bit of sightseeing, and we also spent a lot of time with grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins. When I was in school, I’d visit every two or three years, but since graduating, I haven’t really had time to. This was such an amazing experience, and I really hope I get to go back soon, so I can explore more places! For the most part, we stuck with Beijing and Shandong. Click on to see some pictures!

 

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Year in Review

Welcome, 2018!

January 3, 2018 · 7 Comments

2017 has been a complete whirlwind. I’ve had some major ups, and some pretty big downs as well. We got a new MacBook and I’ve started learning to code, I improved my makeup game (I think? … I hope!), I went to my first tech conference and participated in my first hackathon! Most of all, I learned that I had room in my heart for a kitty. (No, but seriously… I’d always been 100% a dog person up until now.) All in all, some pretty cool things have happened.

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Technology

MailChimp Gives (Feed)back

December 12, 2017 · 3 Comments

Last week, I attended an event at MailChimp called MailChimp Gives (Feed)back! The company offered career counseling and mock interviews along with open-to-the-public panels on career searches, interviewing, whiteboard/technical questions, and even group exercises. I was lucky enough to get both a half hour career counseling session and a mock interview. It was really informative and I learned a lot from my experience there. The entire event was so well put together; there was delicious food (always a plus!), the panels were very well done, and I got a lot of great feedback and tips on breaking into tech and the road to becoming a junior front-end developer. (In case you weren’t aware, that’s my goal for the near future!) Would 100% do again in the future. It’s so amazing that companies like MailChimp offer services like this to the community; everything was free, all I had to do was sign up and tell them a little about myself and my goals.

Here are some things I got out of my time there: both specific to junior front-end development careers and also broad tech-related careers. Hope some of this helps you guys as much as it helped me!

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