fabiochiu/medium-articles huggingface dataset:
Debugging for Dummies
By: Kevin Rodriguez
Tags: Flatiron School, Ruby, Pry, Debugging, Code

Unfortunately, “pest control” is part of the job description. Wether you like it or not. THERE. WILL. BE. BUGS. They’re like these pesky vile little creatures that can be difficult to get rid of and when you do, before you know it, there goes another one. It can be a very daunting experience to deal with. Luckily! With the right tools anyone can exterminate them with ease. Enter Raid.

Uhhh. . . I mean, Pry.😬

Pry is a powerful tool that Ruby developers can use to debug programs. Debugging is something that all programmers do throughout their careers. We spend a ridiculous amount of time debugging. So it occurred to me that getting better at it can improve work flow and efficiency. With that being said let’s get into it!

First things first. Installation!

You’ll need to install the gem by adding it to your Gemfile and running a bundle install in your terminal.

Or, you can manually install it: gem install pry.

Require it at the top of the file you are working in with ‘require pry’ and you’re all set.

Now let’s take a look at the code below.

What this will do is ask the user to guess a number. It will then compare the number the user guessed to the random number and output a message based on the condition.

Let’s run our file and get started!

Oh but look! there’s a bug!

No worries. Let’s bind pry right before the if block that is causing the error like so. . .

This allows you to pause execution at any given line of code, allowing you to check how everything is working.

Then we’ll run the file, and you should see something like the following:

Now what we can do is test what we’d expect our values to be. Keep in mind, that if there are variables after your binding.pry, you won’t have access to their values. If you type user_input in the terminal, it’ll show you the number the user guessed. Then if you type random_number, it’ll show you the random number generated.

This is excellent for figuring out why your code isn’t working. Often times, it’s because the value of a variable is not what you expect. The problem here is that the less than (<) or greater than (>) comparison operators throw an error when the data types are different. It can’t determine wether a number is less than or greater than a string. To fix this we’ll go ahead and convert the users input into an integer.

Type exit to quit pry, run the file (don’t forget to save!) and test your assumptions again and you should see that the user input is now a number and not a string.

Remove the binding and run the file yet again and it should be bug free!

Pry is absolutely awesome and I encourage that any Rubyist learns to use it well. There is so much more Pry is capable of. This was just the basics!

I’ll admit, I was guilty of solely relying on puts statements to debug my code and I personally feel it’s not very effective. Don’t be a puts debugger but instead a pry debugger. You won’t regret it!
A Thank You To My Teachers:
By: Nicoll Oliver
Tags: Gratefulness, Flatiron School, Thank You

Thank you Flatiron School

Well here I am, 5 months later and I’m about to pass my final assessment and graduate from the Software Engineering Program at Flatiron School. I proved it to myself that I could do it, especially with my husband being deployed all through it. Tackling 60–80 hour weeks with a one year old and two year old was NOT EASY in the slightest, but I did it! I’m almost officially done. I just got my husband home about a month ago, after he was away for 11 months and now I feel complete and can tackle anything. 020121 cohort was an awesome community (particularly incredible patience with crying kids in the background during classes) and I am beyond thankful to each and every classmate, but especially thankful to my cohort leads. This blog post is dedicated to my two teachers: Laura Berge & Eriberto Guzman.

To Laura, thank you with all my heart for being organized when teaching concepts and helping me learn to tackle my problems when I go down the rabbit hole. You inspire me to become better at coding daily and really dig deep and understand the why. Being women in tech is hard, but you lead by example and know why things happen. You taught me that women in tech are smart, strong and a force to be reckoned with. Never having any doubt that I would make it to the end of this and encouraging, not only me, but everyone in our cohort. Thank you for being my teacher.

To Eri, thank you for always being 100% honest and showing that it’s okay to not know everything. In this field, we aren’t going to know everything and that’s okay — you taught me to try to be the best researcher out there, when it comes to coding. I learned to be very resourceful by watching you tackle any problem that we brought to you and if you didn’t know the answer, it wasn’t the end of the world — you went right to google and would find it right away or suggest what route to take. That set me up personally to be very comfortable with using my resources wisely.

To both of you, thank you for being total opposites. Teaching me to adapt to different ways of teaching, which in the long run, helped me be a better coder at the end of the day. If I don’t understand something one way, it’s not the end of the world and it pushed me to figure it out one step at a time. If anything, it taught me to learn what I struggled with, in that moment, more in depth. Thank you both for being part of my journey as I start my career, you both shaped me into the coder I am today and as I strive to become better every day. So here’s my thank you to my two cohort leads that help built my foundation. Laura and Eri — you guys are awesome! ❤️

From: Your Student — Nicoll Oliver
Why did you decide to study Software Engineering?
By: Javier Fasciano
Tags: Flatiron School, Why, Learning To Code, Games, Software Engineering

It’s a question I get ask a lot by family members, and friends. In all honestly I decided to learn this craft was because I love and enjoy problem solving. Hello my name is Javier Fasciano and I recently joined Flatiron school online for software engineer which asked the same question a lot of us get asked. Why did you decide to study software engineer ?

For me like I said is because I love problem solving. I enjoy the fact that this field you are constantly learning and have to go through the grind of learning new things and old things that may have slipped from your brain. My love for problem solving honestly came from playing video games. At such a young age trying to figure out how to solve a level, defeat an enemy boss, getting that satisfaction of defeating that said boss is the same satisfaction I get when my code works, and frustration when it doesn’t same as when I play a video game.

Also I enjoy that being a software engineer has me working with people either in person (which due to the times we can’t at the moment) or via video calls (thank you zoom). Not only am I learning about code from someone else‘s perspective but I am learning about the person who I am working with and that is something I enjoy.

Aside from that I also want to get into the field is because I feel it is one of the more flexible jobs out there. Especially during these times where working from home became the norm. Many of us didn’t have that luxury and lost their way of income to support themselves and love ones. This job however lets you work from home or at the beach or at some crazy remote place I see people code. For me it’s the fact that I can get up from my chair pause what work I am doing and go to my child and give him anything he needs when he starts to holler.

There are many more reasons why I chose to become a software engineer, these are just some of the reasons. I do know it won’t be easy it’s not a quick scheme to get rich, there will be nights where I question why am I doing this to myself while I bang my head on the desk. But in the end I will just remember why I am going through this and keep hacking away.

Thanks for taking time out of your day to read this. And I hope you have your answers to the question we all get asked. Why did you decide to become a software engineer ?
Why did I decide to study Software Engineering?
By: Derek Le
Tags: Flatiron School, Software Engineering

When I was laid off from my video editing job, I found myself stuck in trying to get back into full time employment. The next year was sustained through a combination of unemployment checks and small income from my freelance and contract work. It soon dawned on me that there were very few paths upwards, so I began thinking about changing careers.

In deciding what it was that I enjoyed as much as video editing, I remembered the several required programming courses I took in university. These courses covered many common languages in game design and animation, such as Javascript, C#, and Python. Since these topics weren’t quite what I was majoring in, they only ever received the, “‘D’ is for diploma!” mentality. However, that elation I got from problem solving and seeing my code run without errors never quite left me, and I wanted to see what would happen if I gave programming my complete and undivided attention.

After much research on programming boot camps, I decided on Flatiron School for their reputation (and flexible financing through ISA). So here I am, finishing up my first week as a part-time software engineering student. I’m looking forward to what the future has in store for me.
A few CSS properties I’ve been trying.
By: Matt Ericksen
Tags: Front End Development, Flatiron School, CSS

I’ve been working on creating another website and trying to improve my front-end creativity and styling. I’m using this blog to write down and share some of the things I’ve learned recently.

background-blend-mode

Using CSS blend modes is a great way to unify the look of the content across your website. It also enables you to set different color versions of an image by changing only one value in CSS: the color. There are 15 possible blend mode values, including screen, overlay, lighten, and darken.

There are a couple of implementation methods depending on the type of element you would like to apply the effect to. For example, if your using background-image and background-color, you can set background-blend-mode: darken to blend these together and make them a color overlay on the image. You can read more about this property on MDN Web Docs.

Another similar property is mix-blend-mode. This lets you blend content of the element with the content or background of its direct parent. This works especially well on overlapped lettering.

mask

Masking tells your browser which pieces of an element should be visible, and is very useful for building creative shapes and layouts. Masking can be done in three ways: using an image, CSS gradients or an SVG element. Masking is actually quite useful because it enables you to apply the same properties to background images, defining their position, size and repetition.

One great use you’ll normally see for CSS masking is in articles that combine text and images. Irregular containers and images are very popular in print, and thanks to masking this allows for the same use on the web. Here is the MDN Web Docs for mask.

clip-path

A shape’s boundary is called the clip-path, and clipping defines what area will be visible. Clipping is similar to cutting out a piece of paper, anything outside the path will be ‘cut off’, while everything inside the path will stay visible. What cool with this is that we can use shape functions and SVG as clip paths, which lets you do some cool things. For instance, you could animate them into morphing shapes.

The difference between clipping and masking is that masks are images and clips are only vector paths. It’s worth mentioning that masking will consume more memory, as you’re working with a full image so everything has to be done pixel by pixel. Again, you can read more on the MDN Web Docs.
Don’t say no, say how can I
By: Emily Nguyen
Tags: Coding, Flatiron School, Personal Development, Codingbootcamp, Mental

Day One: Saturday

The first thing I noticed about thanks to this challenge was how much more I could do in a day than study, eat, workout, and sleep. It started with a text from my friend. “Hey, do you want to grab dinner this coming Friday?”. Immediately, I started thinking about how much studying I’ll have to do on Saturday if I decide to hangout with her on Friday. It was super clear how easy it was for me to say no because I needed to prioritize my coding bootcamp over dumplings with an awesome friend. But I said “Sure!”. I’ll be there, on time, present for every conversation and hungry as heck. The following Saturday? It wasn’t bad at all, I studied a little bit longer, but it was well worth the evening out with my friend.

Day Two: Sunday

It’s a “school night” and I’m focused on preparing for project week with any finishing touches on my personal knowledge about the material I had just learned about Ruby on Rails so I could feel more confident in being a knowledgable and reliable partner. The first thing I plan to do when I wake is study. Instead, my parents ended up throwing a karaoke dinner night with their closest friends. My mom asked for help preparing the food, I said yes. My dad asked for help fixing the wifi, I said yes. They ask me to sing a few songs, I agree. At this point, I start to question my work ethic. Normally I take a lot of pride in working very hard, but at that moment I felt like I was slacking more than ever. After the guests left, I was asked to help clean up. I said yes. I stayed up three hours past my normal bedtime to get the study hours that I normally put in. Honestly, it wasn’t that bad. I learned that I can push my comfort zone more than I was already pushing it. Plus, I got to show off some singing skills.

Day Three: Monday

Two cohort-mates asked me to help them out with studying for the second round code challenge sometime this week. During a normal week, I totally would’ve said yes with no hesitation. During a project week where I wasn’t going to be in class for half-a-day, it was a bit of a stretch to make happen. But I refused to say no, instead I gave them the option of studying on their own until the day before the challenge and if they felt like they needed somebody to go over the material with them — then I’m there for it. On Monday I planned a two to three hour session to get this done on Wednesday and Thursday while managing my Phase 2 Project. Luckily, I was able to finish all of my core functions by late Tuesday night and wrap up some stretch goals by Wednesday. I grinded the hours on my project early in the week and made time to help a few friends out later in the week. My new mantra became “Don’t say no, say how can I?” and make it happen.
State Management With Vanilla JavaScript
By: Yehuda Bortz
Tags: State Management, Flatiron School, JavaScript, Vanilla Javascript

One of the biggest hurdles one has to cross when creating applications with vanilla JavaScript is maintaining the state of information that is relevant to your application while a user interacts with it.

My Application

In my Bulletin Board web application there are are many different “bulletins” that can be selected by a user, and based off the users selection, “bulletin boards” will be displayed that belong to that specific bulletin. (sorry for the excessive use of the word bulletin)

This was fairly straight forward. All that I needed to do was add an event listener to the input of the dropdown and collect the value of the target element — which contains the id of the bulletin.

I would then pass that id to a fetch function. This would get the data concerning the selected bulletin and then append all of the bulletin boards associated with it. Simple.

But now I wanted to have the functionality to add new items to a specific board. This was not as easy.

The Problem

Each bulletin board card has on it a + icon for adding new items — and on a click event of that + icon a modal would pop up with a form to create a new item.

But for the life of me I could not figure out how to pass data from the bulletin board card to the form in order to let the form know which bulletin board card to create an association of the new item with and where to append the information.

I settled on this…

My Solution

On creation of the new bulletin board card, wether on the first page load or on the creation of a new board using AJAX, I would add an id to the + icon that would be clicked, so I could access it with

event.target

this would allow me to access the attributes that are associated with that event.

However I still needed to pass this data to the AJAX ‘POST’ request in order to know what endpoint to make this request to and which bulletin board to associate this new item with.

I created a custom attribute for the form in the modal that initially does not have any value— only on pop up of the modal with the + icon click event does it get a value. This value is taken from the + icon and corresponds to the unique id of the bulletin board card.

Once passed to the AJAX request, the data is persisted and the board is then re-rendered with the new item.
MLB Scouting Report — Sinatra Project
By: Luis Castillo
Tags: Web Development, Flatiron School, Sinatra, Ruby

One more time I’m here for my second Blog Post Sinatra project for Flatiron School. In this project I have a lot of fun, this is my first own project made from scratch. When we finish the CLI project I was excited for this moment to come, I love web development and the fact that I was able to make my first Web app from scratch it make me so proud of what I have accomplished.

This project helped me a lot to understand a lot more the code and what the code is doing. I’m a person that learn by doing stuff in real time. When I’m doing the labs and when I’m taking live class I get to understand what the professor is talking and some time not. I get confuse with come code but I least I try to understand what is the code for.

MLB Scouting Report is a web app that can help the Scout to create a digital report of a player and they can have this report to they own account. The user is able to register with they preference username and password and have they own account. They are able to see every report that the user post they can also edit the report that belongs to them and delete it if they want as well.

Let me talk about how this app was build. First this app it was builded with Ruby, SQLite, HTML, CSS and Bootstrap. I used the corneal gem to pre-start my app. the Corneal gem create the Model, View and the Controller (MVC) for your application and more folders like DB folder, Public, Config, config.ru file and more file that is necessary to have your application live.

CREATE (ROUTE)

One of my challenge creating the CRUD in my application it was the (C) as CREATE. This block of code basically it said that if any of my input from the user is empty redirect them to create the post again else if they don’t have any empty field create them with the user_id and save them and redirect them to the reports page with id of the report that they create. My challenge trying to save the user_id with the input I was getting from the user and I was able to get it to work with the line of code @report.user_id = session[:user_id], this allow me to have every report that was create to make that report to belong to one person the user_id that create the report.

My web app have more improvement to make which I’m excited to continue to work on it and I want to be able to complete with more styling and more feature so that the user can print this report in PDF when they are created and also they can be able to send this reports to friends or even to a professional Scout in the MLB. I have so much fun building this app that I’m really excited to continue learning and I want to give my 200% to become a great developer. I want to thanks My school Flatiron School, all my cohort mate that help me out and my cohort lead Dj_Ritchey for all his support.
Neurotech or Neurotic?
By: Seedomir Jeden
Tags: Flatiron School, Philosophy, Neuroscience, Programming, Literature

To properly begin, then, a disarmingly simple question: what is neuroscience? The unified, age-old study of the brain, as begun by Erasistratus and Herophilos in ancient Alexandria? Well, no. The OED’s entry for the singular ‘neuroscience’ reveals youth, ambiguity and plurality — the ‘brain’ isn’t even mentioned, and the earliest non-plural usage is from 1970. When the brain is finally mentioned, there is still plurality and instability: neuroscience is not a science but comprised of sciences; it refers not only to anatomy, but also behaviour; its very demarcation already involves ‘differentiating, integrating [and] regrouping’; and finally, neuroscience is the study not of the brain, but the whole nervous system.

Why then do experienced neuroscientists still make concrete, narrow statements, like Swaab’s 2014 book We are our Brains?

Vidal and Ortega: ‘The belief that human beings are essentially their brain […] has become extremely powerful in contemporary culture. Some scientists have, at least by their public pronouncements, contributed to reduce to the brain the range of determinants of human existence.’

Shouldn’t they say ‘we are our nervous systems’, or ‘we are our brains plus our behaviours plus anything that surfaces through differentiating, integrating and regrouping’? Historians and sociologists of science like Vidal and Ortega emphasize this, warning of the widening public acceptance of the human subject being reduced to the ‘cerebral subject’, a reduction of personhood to ‘brainhood’. The philosophical response to such an ontological quandary has been patchy, with (in)famous examples like Churchland’s Neurophilosophy only exacerbating ‘brainhood’. However, as self-styled anti-neurophilosopher Raymond Tallis rightly points out, tackling cerebral subjection on philosophical grounds, though necessary, only prompts equally necessary questions which need to bypass the reactionary dismissal of neuroscience’s genuine benefits to society.

Centuries apart in their attempts, neither philosophy nor neuroscience offers a satisfactory account of human consciousness. On the contrary, as writer David Lodge highlights in a diplomatic gloss on behaviourism, science is only just catching up to philosophy. In fact, Lodge claims literature has succeeded far more than either in truly reflecting consciousness, an important point steadily being recognized by luminaries in the cognitive and neuro-sciences, such as Chomsky, Edelman, Damasio and Dennett.
Crouch, Bind, Set
By: Sam Barrie
Tags: Agile, Flatiron School, Scrum

Herrrrrrrre’s Jamie!

Scrum is something that will often come up during your job searches. I’m sure you’ve seen the banal statement on many a linkedin message from creepy recruiters, “we practice Scrum methodology”.

Outline of the Scrum framework

Scrum is an agile framework used mostly in software development, which is convenient as we are software developers. Agile is also a bit of a buzzword nowadays, it basically just means “small incremental changes to continuously deliver software”. It’s pretty neat to be honest, the basic premise means that through a focus of communication with the client and within the team you can easily adapt to changes in requirements… ohhh that’s why it’s called agile.

Fast boi

It works on the basic agile sprint methodology. A sprint is a timeboxed iteration, absolutely no longer than a month but commonly around two weeks.

It starts with a planning session with the product manager and team leader where they set out the tasks for the sprint, and it ends with a sprint review and retro where you talk about what did and didn’t go well in that sprint.

A big feature of scrum is the daily standups or.. you guessed it, scrums. These are short meetings to help track progress, bring up any blockers and re-plan if necessary. They start on the dot, same time, same place, every day. These are really supposed to be 15 minutes but they can be 5 minutes on a good day or an hour if someone inadvertently breaks prod. But at that point it’s less of a stand up and more of a group whinge.

Owen Farrell thinking about what he’s going to do today

The basic format is this:

this is what I did yesterday .

. this is what I’m going to do today .

. these are any blockers I’m facing/am likely to face.

And that’s it. Usually it’s a good idea to keep things from getting overly technical to stop your responses from getting too verbose and sending your team members to sleep.

At the end of the sprint the team will hold a review and a retrospective

yayyyy we reviewed our game and we did pretty good!

In the review you.. review the work that was completed and what you didn’t finish and demo what was completed to the stakeholders, ie your boss. Or the client. We kinda do this at Flatiron with the little project show and tell at the end of project week.

Minor setbacks.

And finally in the retro you look back on the sprint, you agree on actions to improve the sprint process and how you plan to implement them, usually asking yourselves the questions: “What went well during the sprint? What did not go well? What could be improved for better productivity in the next sprint?”.

There are some more things to consider with Scrum including how to manage a backlog, but assuming that you use something like Jira to manage your tickets these are fairly straight forward.

And that’s.. it? Scrum is really not all that big of a deal and unless you’re the Scrum Master (sigh.) your main goal in a scrum is just do as your told and stay chill.
React, Redux, and Rails Portfolio Project
By: Derek Cerretani
Tags: Flatiron School, React, API, Rails, Redux

Person browsing book shelf

My final Flatiron School assignment was to build a React app. I think the idea is a good one and while I’ve met the requirements to pass my assessment the app is far from being finished.

Here are the requirements…

Use the create-react-app generator to start your project. Your app should have one HTML page to render your react-redux application There should be 2 container components There should be 5 stateless components There should be 3 routes The Application must make use of react-router and proper RESTful routing Use Redux middleware to respond to and modify state change Make use of async actions to send data to and receive data from a server Your Rails API should handle the data persistence. You should be using fetch() within your actions to GET and POST data from your API Your client-side application should handle the display of data with minimal data manipulation Your application should have some minimal styling

I’m calling the app ‘Divvy’. Users with a Divvy profile can log in and list books (aka items) to their personal ‘shelf’ and set a modest rental price, ideally free. They can then browse other users ‘shelves’ and add books to their cart as rentals.

I split the app into two folders, React and Redux on the client side, and rails as an API.

The Rails API is straightforward. Divvy revolves around three models; Shelf, Item, and Cart. Shelves and Carts have many items and Items belong to Shelves and Carts. Since Items join the models together almost all of the data persistence happens in the Items Controller.

Using React I created matching containers on the client side that each contain child components in order to display data. The containers are connected to actions through a Redux store and the actions make RESTful fetch() requests to the Rails API. The data returned is dispatched using Redux Thunk middleware to corresponding reducers for handling CRUD actions.

The trickiest part of React was separation of concerns and making sure that each component only did what was necessary. Initially I felt that the amount of components was getting out of hand but as the project developed and became more complicated I began to see the patterns and understand the way React projects should be organized.

Redux is a whole other beast that at the get-go seemed unnecessary but now I know I couldn’t get by without it. Top level state organization is critical to even a medium size React app and I plan on this growing exponentially over the next few months as I start my job search.

Follow these links for the API repo and Client repo on github.

Also, check out the short video walk-through below.
Use Code Snippets and Make Your Life Easier!
By: Nicholas Feitel
Tags: Flatiron School, Ruby, JavaScript, Ruby on Rails, Rails

Learning to make difficult syntax easier.

Dogs love to fetch and you could too!

Hi there, I’m Nic and I’ve been going through the intensive process of learning multiple computer languages at a coding bootcamp. This means in 12–15 weeks, I’m supposed to grasp things that take people several years of college to get to a level of proficiency at. I had no background in coding coming into the school and often I felt like my mind was like a fridge with everything falling out.

This is how I feel!

When I was learning Ruby on Rails, a popular web framework, I had one piece of important help from my instructor, Ian, who told me about an extension for my Visual Studio Code editor called ‘Simple Ruby ERB’.

Very useful!

This, just like VSCode itself, was totally free and gave me lots of cool helper functions like typing “link_to” with easy syntax, which was nice to help me with some tricky syntax with Rails that was new to me.

Neato!

As you can see, just typing “lin” pulls up a simple menu that generates the syntax for “link_to” with easy to replace fields, even including the Ruby evaluation “squids” or “<%= %>” to help me evaluate my code. This is massively useful.

However, there were other Rails-specific functions like “form_for”, “collection_select” and “delete_button” that had difficult syntax and, even worse, I had learned Rails on a Thursday and I was expected to be tested on it by the following Wednesday! I was just beginning to understand this thing!

Halpppppp

Luckily, I found the greatest resource available to me in my coding bootcamp: other nice coders! A fellow coder, Gene, told me about user snippets, the ability to write as a user our own shortcut methods like the ones given to me by Simple Ruby ERB!

When I was preparing for that less-than-a-week-away code challenge, Gene gave me his code snippets and even showed me how to add them.
Lorem Ipsum- anything other than placefiller?
By: Shari Rosenberg
Tags: Lorem Ipsum, Flatiron School, Design

Lorem ipsum, the standard filler text that is known across the world by developers and designers alike, has an interesting history that has been widely misunderstood.

Sometimes using Lorem ipsum is called “Greeking” - however, that is a misnomer, as the text is actually Latin and not Greek. This text is primarily used to direct people to look at the layout and styling, as opposed to the text copy- and not be accidentally published. It has proven to be a great text simulator as the words are typical word length and used with a pretty normal frequency- it looks like real language and the wording has become a standardized practice.

For centuries, the often used text was described as just Latin gibberish, but as discovered in the 1980’s by Latin scholar and professor Richard McClintock, the text is actually taken from part of a writing by the Roman philosopher and writer, Cicero, published in 45 BC, from an essay translated as “The Extremes of Good and Evil”.

The terminology has actually been used as filler text since the sixteenth century, but the words are no longer orderly and sensical- they have been rearranged to make nonsense statements. Some theorize that was done on purpose, as to not distract from the graphics. The Google Translation is interesting-

Not really the text you want to see on your site, but that is the idea…
Are Coding Bootcamps Worth It?
By: Sarah Daniels
Tags: Coding, Technology, Flatiron School, Software Development, Careers

Learning How To Learn.

My bootcamp experience lasted fifteen short weeks. Some are shorter, some are longer. Despite the length, no bootcamp is going to teach you everything you need to master in tech.

They do you one better and teach you HOW to learn.

Rewind to early bootcamp Sarah: I remember struggling to use Google for simple things. Any and all error messages left me feeling pretty helpless. Depending on who you ask, I perhaps sobbed a few times.

I cranked out A’s in nursing school, yet I hella sucked at coding school.

I sucked because I didn’t understand HOW to learn, and I almost straight-up failed.

Fast forward to today, I’m an employed software engineer thanks to the tools they gave me to dig myself out of that hole.

Traditional school, as I experienced it, taught me how to read books and regurgitate the information. A bootcamp is different: you’re shown your tools and how to use them in many ways. You can pore over notes and beat to death what an array is, but in what ways do you use it? When is it most appropriate? When is it not?

You’re going to be introduced to the tools of the trade, practice using them, and learn how to upgrade them as your career progresses. This know-how sticks with you forever and is adaptable to anything you want to master in the future.

Think of it this way: traditional schooling teaches you the mechanics of a pushup, and if they’re nice, they provide you with an unhelpful diagram.

Coding bootcamps make you do the pushups. And the deadlifts. And a few laps. And after all the hullabaloo, they teach you how to use your resources to learn other exercises in the future.

I learned how to have a growth mindset.

Cracking into something new is difficult at any age. Sticking with what we’re accustomed to is much easier, with whatever “the grind” is.

Where will being relaxed and static take us, though?

To be successful, we need to be a little masochistic and welcome some growing pains.
Need a Boston birth certificate? You can now order one online
By: City Of Boston
Tags: Birth, Technology, Innovation, Civictech, Digital

Benefits of moving online

One big reason we felt the need to move online was the increased demand for birth certificates. This is thanks in large part to the REAL ID Act, a piece of legislation passed in 2005 by the federal government. The act mandated an “enhanced driver’s license” be issued separate from standard licenses to citizens. Soon U.S. Citizens will need either this enhanced driver’s license or a passport to enter certain federal buildings and to fly in the United States.

The act included more stringent requirements for verifying a person’s identity to receive a license. In Massachusetts, you need your birth certificate just to get a license. For this reason, the Registry Department has seen a huge uptick in requests as we near the federal deadline for compliance with the law. The law will go into full effect on October 1, 2020, so birth certificate requests will only continue to grow. Creating an online option for this process will make things easier and more efficient for both residents and City staff.

And let’s face it, for a lot of folks, it’s just not easy to get into City Hall. Whether you need to find a babysitter or take time off of work, the trip can be a real hassle. If you live out-of-state, it’s even more of a pain. While it’s true that there was always a mail-in option with the Registry Department, the process of printing out the form, mailing it, and waiting for the order to be processed and mailed takes a few weeks. People on a tight timeline were left with few options. Moving these types of City services online for residents and those born in the City just makes sense.

It’s worth noting that, before we started this project, the process of ordering birth certificates was not entirely offline. People still have the option to go through VitalChek, a third-party service contracted by the state, to find their vital records. But, requests often cost more than $40, not including shipping and processing fees. Orders can also take more than a few weeks to process. As the main source of truth for birth certificates in Boston, we felt that we were well-positioned to offer a quicker, cheaper, and more streamlined option.
China Forcing Muslims To Use Birth Control
By: Research Mind
Tags: Birth, Covid 19, Control, Life, China

To slash the birth rate amongst Uighurs and other minorities the Chinese government is taking some measures. According to an investigation, they are doing this as a part of a campaign to restrict the Muslim population.

According to an App investigation based on government statistics, state documents, and interviews with 30 ex-detainees, family members, and a former detention camp instructor an individual woman has spoken out about this forced birth control before.

The data shows that the state is regularly getting the minority women to pregnancy check-ups and also forces intrauterine devices, sterilization, and even abortion on thousands of women.

The usage of IUDs has risen very fast in the west region of Xinjiang where the campaign was carried on the same hand the use of IUDs and sterilization has fallen nationwide.

If the parents have three or more children they are taken away from their families if they do not have enough money to pay the big fines. Whereas the police come and raid their homes to find their hidden children. Having too many children was one of the major reasons people were sent to detention camps.

One of the Chinese born Kazah, GulnarOmirzakh stated that after she had her third child, she was asked to get an IUD inserted by the government. On the other hand, two years later after these four military officials came to her place and asked her to pay a $2,685 fine for having more than two children. And they wanted her to pay the entire fine within three days.

She said very heavy heartedly that “God Bequeaths children on you. To prevent people from having children is wrong”.Some of the data shows that there has been a sense of terror in the people of Uighur regions for having children. The birth rate in Xinjiang has dropped down to 24% in comparison to last year which was a national drop of 4.2%.

Besides Uighurs the others are getting more points on college entrance exams, hiring quotas for government posts, and many other things which clearly define that China has the system of minority entitlement in the world.Some of the Chinese officials have claimed that the new rules would be equally the same for Han Chinese and ethnic minority allowing them the same number of children.

Source- China Forcing Muslims To Use Birth Control
Around the sun.
By: Khumbulani Mpofu
Tags: Birth, Death, Birthday, Angels, Ancestors

Around the sun.

I'm walking.

I'm dancing.

I'm playing.

Im singing.

I'm laughing.

Into my 41st year. This week I break into another, through the Grace of God. The past year, and all that is this, I dare not even say lightly. That there was pain and suffering at every corner and around the bend. I do say there was joy, yet, and still 2019 tried to kill me!

But 2020 woke me up to the brutal reality, that we owe our entire existence to the one True Source.

And if your internal compass is not dialled to the one True North, you will stray and you will exit The Matrix. If you choose the wrong pill.

But I found my faith, in which I now remain resolute. I cast no judgement, to the ills, to the hardships that are now coming to pass, and for the emotional torture, I bear no grudge. As it all becomes history.

But we have one life, as far as we know, even when we speculate that there is another that comes after we die, and if that is not the truth, then we should hope to become a benevolent ancestor for those that continue to live, and those that come after those other ones, into the future.

So I now take each day. I seize it. I grab it by the scruff of its neck, and I ask for it to bleed with me, just as I venture into the unknown that it holds, and that it represents. And I pray, that when I die, when I do, because we all will. That I become a friendly ancestor, or guardian angel, for those that remain, and for those that come after me, into the future.

By His Grace, I welcome, yet another rotation.

Around the sun.
Giving Birth To Say Goodbye
By: Katie Carroll
Tags: Birth, Women, Family, Abortion, Parenting

From the very beginning they told us our baby’s condition was “incompatible with life” — it’s a term that never really rung true to me, seeing that our baby was living and growing inside of me. I could feel him moving!!

It seems to be a common theme when your baby isn’t going to survive. Pretend they don’t exist, get it over with quickly, sweep it under the carpet. But like my husband said in this scenario, the carpet was me, my body and my psyche.

While ultimately the decision was mine, everyone assumed that we would terminate the pregnancy, and there was a lot of pressure both from medical professionals and friends and family, to do it quickly so that it wouldn’t be “too hard” or “too much strain on my body”. The obvious answer to almost everyone was to have an abortion straight away so I wouldn’t have to go through labour.

I felt hurried and pressured. While discussing the possibility of inducing labour as a way to get to meet our baby and say goodbye, one obstetrician told me I had to make “the practical decision for my other two children”. By that she meant a quick surgical abortion.

But how did she know what was the practical decision for me and my family?

No, only we could decide that. So I made the conscious decision to slow things right down.

I knew straight away I didn’t want a surgical abortion. I had found the surgery for the ectopic pregnancy quite traumatic and I’d always regretted not having the confidence to ask for my baby’s remains. This time I wanted to be strong and make decisions we could all be at peace with.

The idea of going to sleep and waking up, empty, as if nothing had happened horrified me. I felt there was no way around it, no shortcut.

Whatever we decided, we would be losing the baby and we just had to go right through the middle of it.

I kept hearing that Bear Hunt nursery rhyme in my head…

We can’t go over it. We can’t go over it.

We can’t go under it. We can’t go under it.

We’ve got to go through it!

We went to a maternal fetal medicine specialist and did a more detailed ultrasound. He confirmed that not only did our baby have severe anencephaly, but a host of other problems that would impact on any short life he may have. He believed this baby would not make it to full term and could very possibly have troubles being born without a c-section. If he was born alive, he would live just minutes, he said.
Unsexy: Becoming a Postpartum Doula
By: Carolyn Rush
Tags: Birth, Doula, Women, Postpartum

Birth is exciting, sexy, transformative and follows a narrative that pleases us. Postpartum, however, is messy, decidedly UNsexy, and seriously lacking in resources, dialogue and visibility benefitting the desires of a modern woman.*

Following the UNsexy goes against culture, but exposes the greatest need. I thought about the kind of work being a great postpartum doula requires, and I thought, that definitely sounds both instinctual and like the most challenging act. I often find myself victim to saying rather than doing, and being a postpartum doula requires doing without saying, without judgement or being assertive with your own experience. This opens us up to witness to mother in her own power, her face flushing with life after eating protein and feeling strong, seeing her baby latch or take to a bottle and feeling incredibly proud of herself and the warrior she’s just transformed into.

Hang with me here but I always sort of wanted to pursue being a nun. Not because I’m overly religious, (I’m also married, so it ain’t happening!) but because I saw it as the ultimate training in being a great human. My principal growing up, Sister Monica, did ONLY unsexy work. She was always listening, holding space for people from all walks of life in their triumphs and darkest moments. She was working with the poor when no one was watching, working with ungrateful middle schoolers and their most obnoxious parents, in the hope that the love she showed us made an impact somewhere down the road, praying for those who have hurt her. I don’t think I ever really knew anything about her, except that she loved well. I saw her as the ultimate expression of confidence.

Not to mention I also adore women. Old, young, conservative, liberal, ostentatious, ridiculous, meek, rich, poor. Being a postpartum doula, for every kind of woman out there feels like the most direct way to express that love. Silently come in, without really being noticed, feed her, nourish her, love her, plug her phone in, leave her alone, rub her back, walk her dog, serve her.

In the rest of the world, it seems like you need to assert our opinion everywhere and be “thought leaders” to succeed. In this world, to succeed, you need to love well and love often.

*my favorite quotes from Laura & Erica of Birdsong Brooklyn

**photo by unknown sourced from Carriage House Birth
The pandemic has caused the world’s birth rate to collapse
By: Jonathan Vincent
Tags: Birth, Covid 19, Fertility, Lockdown

The world reached peak lockdown on April 8th 2020, when the majority of the global population, over 3.9 billion people, were legally required to stay at home. Many people spent more time together with their cohabitants than ever before. One might expect that couples, forced into close proximity and with little else to do, would have whiled away their time making more babies than usual. In fact, the opposite seems to have happened.

Birth rates in January 2021, 9 months after peak lockdown, have plummeted. California and Spain saw falls of over a fifth, year on year. France, often envied in Europe for its relatively high birth rate, recorded a decline of 14%. Hungary’s rate fell by 10%, in spite of the government’s generous pro-natal subsidies.

What is behind such a precipitous drop? The biggest culprit is money. Having a child is an expensive endeavour in the rich world, and couples are well aware of it. Sudden joblessness or loss of income forces would-be parents to think twice about having children, potentially leading them to postpone or cancel their family plans.

The financial situation of aspiring parents is difficult to measure, but data on GDP growth can serve as a reasonable proxy for economic anxiety. By comparing each countries’ GDP growth in the second quarter of 2020, with the drop in the birth rate (relative to the yearly trend) 9 months later, a remarkable pattern emerges. Countries that weathered the economic storm best, like Lithuania and South Korea, saw only a minor pandemic-induced effect on their birth rates. In Finland, where the economy shrank by less than 5%, the birth rate even increased. On the other hand, countries that were hit hard economically, like Spain and Hungary, suffered a big drop in births.

There remains a glimmer of hope for weary demographers. In a parallel to the Harvesting Effect, which posits that a high Covid-19 death rate now will be offset by fewer deaths later, the current birth rate may yet rebound to above average levels after the pandemic subsides. A study by the Institute for Family Studies shows that following other epidemics, the birth rate reaches its lowest point 9 months after the initial outbreak, but goes on to recover, and after 20 months, it peaks at 120% of the historical level.

There may already be signs of this happening in South Korea. The outbreak there began earlier than in Europe or North America, with lockdowns and social distancing being imposed in February, rather than late March. The year on year decline in birth rate bottomed out in November, at -16%, but then rose to -8% in December. Global data for February, likely to be released later this month, will show whether couples were really forgoing children, or merely postponing them.