The areas I’m least comfortable with is starting and ending a project. More specifically, a project with more than just me as a contributor.

It’s always a good idea to update your README.txt file so that it’s easy for new contributors to get their environment set up. Still doesn’t make me super confident, but I’m sure that comes with experience.

What makes me more nervous though, is when you’re ready to push. This week I was updating  the company website as part of my internship and after making the changes and received approvals, I was ready to push. Here’s the process I took:

Ready to merge

This allows you to get the most recent version of code which is especially important if you have more than one developers working on the site.
From your branch (lets call it branchname)
git checkout master
git pull

From master:
git checkout branchname

Now that your back in your branch, you want to merge master with branchname and not the other way around. This allows you to check to see if any of your changes will conflict with anything recently changed by another developer.
If there are conflicts, you’ll need to sort them out and determine which ones to keep.

If there are no conflicts and you are ready to merge your branchname into master
git checkout master
git merge branchname

Now they are merged together but your not done yet. You still need to actually push these changes to the repository and to your host.
git push origin master (to your repository)
git push heroku master (to the host, it this example, heroku)

I had my first informal code review yesterday. By informal, I mean my lead and I sat in a room and just went through the website I recently built for a client.

It’s always hard when someone calls your baby ‘ugly’ but I also think character is built when you take criticism well. We weren’t going to do a review, but I specifically asked for two reasons.

1. To make sure I wasn’t delivering a shoddy product
2. To learn from my mistakes and their expertise

my lessons:

• Mobile first is easier than last.
• Assume everyone will look at the site on a mobile device.
• You have to test on various browsers – IE is still prevalent no matter how much you avoid it.
• Bootstrap is structured so that you use a container, row and columns.
• Usually, if you add rows and columns at the start of your section, you don’t need to repeat yourself through out that section unless you are creating multiple columns.
• Embracing technologies you haven’t used before, in this case jquery, is fun.
• Estimating is hard so under commit and over deliver.
• Ask for a code review as soon as possible instead of waiting until the end.

I’ve been thinking about ACT-W PDX since it wrapped up last weekend. Trying to absorb all the wonderful tidbits of information and deciding what my biggest lesson was – which is no easy task!

 

Especially when you look at the lineup of fantastic speakers. These were just a few of my favorites.

• Let’s give it up to @perrysetgo who gave a wonderful performance as the very first MC of the conference
• CEO and founder of ChickTech, @jlevenha shared a very personal story of how ChickTech came to be
• I loved the keynote from @jillnelsonpdx who reminded me that if you do what you are passionate about, you won’t let anything get in the way.
• A super informative session from @WhataTiberius on salary negotiations – who by the way I was super excited to meet. She too has an HR background before transitioning to engineering!

But by far, I think my favorite session was the last one of the conference.

When @AndoTheRando taught me to break shit! Weird I know.

But he reminded me that sometimes, you have to break something before you can fix it. It’s ok to not know the answer.

Write down your question and your hypothesis. Then look it up and write down what you found.

Doing this makes the information stick!

Pick something, google it and look at the documentation. It will sink in so much more when you are looking at it for fun rather than because you have to!

 

The other lesson I learned from him, read what the method does!! Don’t assume what the return value will be. That caught me a few times!