Week 3 at Hackbright

Today is the first day of Week 3, and it's already great. We wrapped up last week with DevFest Silicon Valley at Google HQ on Friday... It was intimidating and awesome. Almost all attendees were women(!) and though most of the talks were over my head, I learned some cool things about browser functionality, HTML5, user-sniffing & feature detection. And our fabulous teacher Liz gave a hilarious & very relevant talk on gay marriage's impact on databases!

Google HQ kiiiinda feels like the center of the universe. There are obviously Very Important Things happening at all times, which necessitated security escorts everywhere, including the restroom. Not even kidding. They also had those crazy automated toilets with heated seats in every stall, further emphasizing how even poops at Google are Very Important Things requiring much consideration, attention and even temperature control.

So although I'm starting out with little sleep and 2nd-degree burns on my face (fish fry casualty), I am SO EXCITED because today my pair partner Kelley and I completed an awesome assignment -- we created a Twitter bot that compiles bits of text from Walt Whitman's "Song of Myself" to make "new" 140-character poems!!!

Our bot! Click to see him in action.

Also, this morning I met one of my idols: Paul Johnson, who wrote the amazing book Fish Forever -- required reading for anyone who cares about seafood & sustainability. J & I woke up super early & headed into SF to pick up fish from Paul's company, Monterey Fish Market, for the first time! We took a quick tour around their facility, saw their guys cutting up LOTS of gorgeous fish, and talked conservation, catch methods & seafood seasonality with two of the most knowledgeable and engaged people in the local seafood movement! It was a thrill.

This week at Hackbright we'll be learning about cool stuff like regular expressions, SQL and of course, even more useful & interesting applications for python. I'll also be cooking up some blackgill rockfish at home & for our customers, trimming smoked albacore loins & turning those trimmings into a tuna salad for samples at Three Stone Hearth on Wednesday, and hopefully meeting & connecting with a techie mentor on Weds. night!! So much awesome.