A new Node/Express project featuring Member Berries! — A Co-Maker and I met up during the week to work on an idea he’d had for a project, inspired by South Park, to help us learn Express — the fast, un-opinionated framework for Node. Member When? is going to be a super-simple single page email reminder app. You go…

Makers Academy is just an awesome organisation. — As a class at Makers went through 12 weeks of debugging hell and back together over webcam. Somehow, we all got on well enough to want more! Naturally there’s some trepidation when you finally all arrange to meet in 3D. …

Var/Let, Arrow notation: what’s all the fuss? — The deal with let and const: Why var is no longer used I found a good Treehouse workshop on the Full Stack JS track that explains why const and let are the new var, and what actually differs about them in practice. There are two things to remember on this: const will create errors when you try to reassign it. This helps…

Surprise Ruby Test, some Java snippets and how to get a free PluralSight Subscription — My first Tech Interview Fail! I interviewed at the Makers office with a Kentish Town-based consultancy called Softwire, who are looking for two new recruits. They sound pretty much exactly what I’m looking for: great on-boarding, smart teams and a roster of awesome clients including the BBC. …

…f*&k all was happening. — Pestering people for jobs is always a thankless task just before Christmas, so I’m trying to keep up momentum by going back through the endless list of things I left to do when the course was over. (Including finishing this blog, shhh). Despite my mum’s boyfriend bringing quantities of wine…

That actually wasn’t so bad. — And just like that the marathon of a lifetime is over. And it ended with a hilarious Friday afternoon with beers, watching our pre-recorded presentations back alongside Ben dressed in a tuxedo, something he said he’d do several weeks back. …

Save a Nation is getting made! — Last Friday’s Final Project selection process was a real nail-biter. But it ended in good news — I threw an idea into the ring, and 2 rounds of voting later, managed to get a really great team on board to make it! Save a Nation is an app idea I…

Some mental weightlifting, software craft… and even some Warcraft — With another full project in the bag, this week it was time to head back into the basics and revise our nitty gritty programming technique, in preparation for job applications. Several things came up this week that illuminated new areas and problems in Ruby and Javascript for me — for…

Time to start thinking about the future. Here’s what I learned trying out an integrated front-and-back-end JS framework. — Ah, more group projects… meaning more behind-the-scenes political wrangling as we decided who was working with who and on what. A fair few interesting ideas were floated around, but for most of us this week was less about what we wanted to build than it was about which technology we…