Benchmarking and profiling data: two takes
Jun 13, 2016
After working on a personal project that took in a lot of data, to the tune of a fraction of the human genome, I inherited a Turing brown field project that has been worked on by various groups of students in an iterative fashion. It had accumulated several thousand database records linking various jobs with their respective companies and locations and we realized we were trying to answer questions about how much chronological data we could query at a time without knowing how slow those queries actually were.
9 Principles of Successful API Documentation In Snippet and Screenshot
May 1, 2016
The third module of the Turing program focuses heavily on consuming and creating APIs, and the first thing that these masses of junior developers encounter with any API is its documentation. How to authenticate. What format requests are made in. What information to expect in a response. An API inherently exists to facilitate sharing a great resource and thus its documentation is its gateway: it either convinces developers to turn elsewhere or welcomes them in for a successful encounter. Parse Server writes that the documentation is the “most important piece of UX for a developer”.
Dynamic technical demos, or how I tried to show that not all hackers need wear hoodies
Mar 10, 2016
As one of the requirements of Turing is that on three occasions you present a lightning talk on a technical topic, I had put a lot of thought into potential topics. I knew I wanted to try something that was more of a demonstration in nature rather than just informative. After creating and presenting a demo of cross-site scripting that was successful for several of my own criteria, including audience interaction, I offer the lessons I learned on implementing your own technical demonstration.
Learning about ERB...and actually using ERB
Jan 29, 2016
I ran into an issue trying to get Jekyll variables for previous and next pages to work, and assumed there was some Jekyll magic I was missing. Though I was misunderstanding part of the way Jekyll variables can be chained together, what I was really missing was realizing I could apply knowledge I already had to make Jekyll better.
First Commit
Jan 28, 2016
As cliche as the ubiquitious first post is, it’s also a fun reminder to disconnect yourself from obligations or mental hangups.
As part of beginning the second instructional module at Turing School I was to learn (refresh) my knowledge of HTML and CSS and create a blog to contribute technical posts to during the course of the year. It was recommended we try Jekyll, described as a “blog-aware” static page tool. I had utterly forgotten that my husband Mark began using Jekyll years ago, while I was fumbling with WordPress themes.