beth qiang

March 23, 2017

In case you missed it, I've taken on the roles of both CTO and a developer for an organization called Working Women Advocates. One of my classmates from Fullstack began the project while we were in the program, and we're now working towards making it an official non-profit organization.

March 13, 2017

SXSW has descended upon Austin, which means several things: 1. The entire city comes alive with an amazing energy. 2. The traffic and parking situations become much worse than they already are and it’s basically a useless proposition to go anywhere near downtown unless you’re going to a SXSW event.

March 2, 2017

A few weeks ago, a friend sent me a link to an event dubbed "The Social Impact Create-A-Thon," mentioning that it might be something that might interest me. (It very much did.)

February 23, 2017

Well, folks. Fullstack's officially over. (In fairness, it's been over for almost a week now, and I just haven't quite gotten around to writing about it.) It's...weird.

February 20, 2017

Teleportation was something I ended up working on for basically a week straight, during which I produced multiple iterations of how to accomplish it with the Daydream controller. The plan was to shoot a raycaster into the ground, find where it intersected with the ground, and then move the user's avatar to that intersection point. Sounds simple enough, right?

February 13, 2017

So, it's been a while. In the past couple of weeks, our project has gone from a scaffolded foundation to a thing with different rooms and avatar skins and couches, and it's been really cool to see!

January 30, 2017

Most of our work on our Capstone project this past week has been trying to set up the base for what we'll be building the super cool features off of. So far, I ported my prototype over, put React in, took React out, put React in again, put Redux and Immutable.js in, fixed race conditions, and learned an important lesson about querySelector.

January 23, 2017

Step 1: Come up with an idea. Decide upon attempting to prototype a social VR app that would support many users, as there isn't one that exists today that does so, and ideally (if time permits) implement real-time audio.

January 18, 2017

We presented Codsworth Robotics, your one and only source for robot butlers, today in class. It's officially live here, and you can view the code here. Although it still may be far from a production-ready app, it's basically a fully-functioning e-commerce store.

January 15, 2017

In the past few days, we've moved on from working primarily on the back-end of Codsworth Robotics to actually rendering the data our back-end is feeding to us. We've also started putting together an overall theme and look.

January 12, 2017

I'm alive, I promise. Mostly. I'm just running on very little sleep. Also, can we talk about the fact that this is the first post I get to tag with "senior phase"?! So, let's talk about everything I've been doing since the last time I wrote about something that wasn't me accidentally deleting my master branch of my blog.

January 9, 2017

Big things have been happening in the past three weeks! First, let's talk about this site. I started getting annoyed a while ago because my Jekyll site would build somewhat slowly — it'd take about two seconds each time.

December 22, 2016

For the past few days, I've spent most of my time slowly cobbling together the Game of Life using React, Redux, and Sass. There's actually really not that much Sass – starting out, I wanted to practice it, although now that I'm halfway through, I'm realizing that I really don't need it.

December 14, 2016

We're six and a half weeks in, which also means we're halfway done with Fullstack Academy. It's still a little crazy to think about, and I've been having a little bit of trouble processing this in its entirety.

December 11, 2016

So, I’ve kind of fallen off the face of this blog for the past week. Apologies for that – it’s been an incredibly busy week. Tomorrow is our Senior Checkpoint; it’s kind of like our final exam to make sure that we’re sufficiently prepared to move on to Senior Phase.

December 5, 2016

Today, we talked about forms in React. And practiced more React-y stuff. The more important part of the day was that I stood up in front of people, talked, and was slightly less terrified than I am when I see a spider! But we'll get to that in a second.

December 4, 2016

It's been a slightly crazy week. I missed two days of class to attend Node.js Interactive North America, which was enormously fun and educational but also meant that I had two days of class to catch up on, in addition to staying on top of what we were learning every day.

December 3, 2016

We've now entered the wonderful but occasionally odd and confusing world of React. It's a super cool piece of technology and I'm very quickly falling head-over-heels for it, but it's also...weird.

November 30, 2016

Thanks to Women Who Code, I was given a ticket to Node.js Interactive North America, “the marquee event for JavaScript developers, companies that rely on Node.js, and the vendors that support both of these constituents.” The two days covered a wide spectrum of aspects and use cases for Node.js and its ecosystem.

November 28, 2016

We spent the day continuing to work with JQuery and AJAX on our Trip Planner app (previous posts: here and here, this time with the goal of making it persistent – that is, making the user's trip data more permanent by saving it to and retrieving it from a database.

Also: lots of food, Fantastic Beasts, and TV

November 27, 2016

We ended class early on Wednesday because of the holiday. Given the couple of hours that we had, my pair and I primiarly worked on figuring out how to "persist" (at least until the server is reset) the hotels, restaurants, and activities that the user chooses on the days that they add them to.

November 22, 2016

Yesterday morning, we had a checkpoint over Express and Sequelize – a three-hour long evaluation of sorts to see where we were at in our understanding of the concepts and their usage.

November 20, 2016

With a CS Saturday about functional programming, immutability, and Git under our belts, we're officially halfway through Junior Phase. Um, what? Yeah, so, that's a thing.

Aka, when I stop just doing CSS willy-nilly and actually learn how it works

November 16, 2016

A couple of good changes have been made over the past couple of days. First, I've been making it a priority to get outside every day – even if it's just for 15 minutes, it's been great to just step away from a screen for a bit.

Also: testing, promises, and Game Night round 2

November 16, 2016

Let’s talk about feelings for a second. I’m generally a very optimistic person with a decent amount of confidence in myself, my critical-thinking and problem-solving abilities, and my ability to stick with something when it’s challenging. I don’t like to dwell on the negatives, and I generally try not to let myself get too down. But today was kind of a sucky day.

November 14, 2016

The past day has been a complete whirlwind of learning and figuring out why things are going wrong. We built a Wikipedia clone with the following features: * A homepage that lists all the pages in the Wiki * The ability to create new pages * Page searching * Tagging

November 13, 2016

The running theme this week was back-end work: Node, Express, and SQL. Most of my work in the past has been entirely on the front-end, with a week of learning back-end on my own right before Foundations started.

November 12, 2016

After the callback hell we experienced yesterday, we learned about promises today. A promise, according to my instructor and the Promises/A+ Spec and basically any other legitimate source, represents the eventual result of an asynchronous operation.

November 10, 2016

I don’t understand how it’s almost the end of the week already. Time is literally flying. We've spent the entirety of the past two days focused on databases, which has been a nice blast to the past – as a relatively recent data analtyics consultant, it's been nice working with SQL again, albeit in a slightly different manner.

November 9, 2016

We built a Twitter clone app with Node and Express, and wanted it to have the following: * A place to store data (nothing fancy yet – just an object will do) * A homepage that lists all tweets from all users * A profile page that displays a specific user’s tweets * A form to post new tweets (and as an extra bonus, enable it to update in real-time for all clients connected to the server at the time)

November 8, 2016

I started off my day with watching a fantastic talk about event loops, and then briefly looking at a Code Wars problem. I’ve done a few Code Wars problems in the past, but we’ve now been incentivized — if we reach 4 kyu (for those who aren’t familiar, that just refers to a certain level) by the end of Junior Phase, we get a cool shirt.

November 6, 2016

With a day on compiler theory and building our own parsers on Saturday, week 1 of my immersive experience at Fullstack (and of the junior phase) is officially over! I’m a little overwhelmed. We’re learning A LOT every single day, and I haven’t felt like I’ve truly absorbed (or even understood!) all of it yet.

November 4, 2016

We spent the first half of the day working on Conway’s Game of Life, which is probably one of the more widely known examples of cellular automaton. In this “game,” the player’s only interaction with the game is at the very beginning, when the board is first set. (It can also be set randomly, requiring no user input at all.) Each round after, cells “live” or “die” according to predetermined rules.

November 3, 2016

Today, we went over our selector/DOM traversal exercise from yesterday, and our instructors showed us some ES6 syntax. I thought the coolest one was array destructuring, which allows you to assign multiple variables to multiple array elements at once.

November 2, 2016

We started off the day attempting to implement binary search trees and hash tables. We implemented our binary search tree with a linked list. We started by creating two constructor functions, one called BinarySearchTree and one called Node - our original approach was to create the root node as an instance of BinarySearchTree, and then for each node off of it to be an instance of Node.

November 1, 2016

Though our cohort technically started at the end of September with 4 weeks of Foundations, October 31, 2016, marks my first day of Fullstack Academy's Remote Immersive. The first half of the day was dedicated to introductions from everyone and an orientation outlining everything to come.

October 24, 2016

This weekend was a big weekend for me. Here’s a shortlist of what I achieved: * Made my first real pull request (and my second, and my third) * Made my first open source contribution(s) * Sort-of learned React * Understood what a back-end developer actually does * Created a semi-functional full-stack application from scratch with a small team * Coded so much that my brain hurt by the end of the weekend * Met some really, really cool people * Ate a lot of tacos

October 21, 2016

If you’ve been following along on my journey thus far, at this point, I’ve been accepted to and received various scholarship amounts from Fullstack Academy, Galvanize, and Viking Code School. Here’s how I made the decision between those three.

So I know what it is...but what exactly is it?

October 17, 2016

Test Driven Development (TDD) and testing were always terms that people would casually talk about and debate the merits of, but I never actually knew what it was. The furthest I ever managed to get was the understanding that it was “a way to make sure that what your code is doing what it should be doing,” which, while true, isn’t very descriptive or helpful in actually understanding what it was or how to do it.

October 17, 2016

Once I had made the decision to apply to a bootcamp, the question then became: which ones? There are now more options than ever available to those wanting to attend, and it can be a daunting task to sift through them all and find one that fits what you’re looking for.

The very beginning, Free Code Camp, and my decision to apply to bootcamps

October 12, 2016

From as young as I can remember, I wanted to be a doctor. I loved science and problem-solving and wanted to use the two to one day save the world. Partway through college, after a long period of insightful conversations and self-reflection, I came to the conclusion that medicine wasn’t what I wanted to do with my life, it wasn't going to be something I would find personally fulfilling, and it wasn't where I thought I could make the most impact.