Horizons Week 2 - Won Tickets to TechCrunch Disrupt Hackathon and Hacked with Apple ARKit - Steemit Milestone 600th Follower
Horizons School of Technology Week 2
Hello again everyone! Hope everyone had a great week. Just got back from an insane hackathon yesterday and now at TechCrunch Disrupt SF this morning so this post is a day delayed. However, the content will not disappoint :)
To begin, here is a video of my team's presentation (I am the one in the blue jacket using the phone):
I'll follow a similar format to last week:
- What I learned this week
- What I ate this week
- What I did this week
What I Learned
HTML: This is the most basic element of the frontend. It is essentially the structure of a webpage. Think of chapters of a book. They aren't the content of the book or even the styling of the book, but are important for the structure of the book.
CSS: The basic styling of a webpage. In my opinion, the boring part. Requires patience and the ability to "see what you are doing." In this day and age, there is not much reason to ever write your own CSS from scratch.
Bootstrap and Flexbox: Some nice tools for formatting pages. Bootstrap is a NECESSITY as it is a good baseline of prebuilt CSS. Another huge benefit of Bootstrap, and a major benefit of Flexbox as well, is the ability to create responsive web design. Responsive design means the webpage will look good on mobile AND desktop, things will keep their proportions, and design will be purposefully created for specific screen sizes.
JQuery: A JavaScript library that is "essentially frontend Javascript." It allows for easy manipulation of CSS and HTML elements allowing for animation, user interaction, and overall frontend coolness.
Ajax: A tool for making API calls. Here is a diagram basic web app infastructure:
Right now, we are basically on the left block and working our way to the middleware. AJAX allows for us to begin this transition and begin communication with the API.
What I Ate
Streat Food Park: Torrakura Ramen:
Link: https://torrakuramen.com/
Off the Grid: Aburaya Japanese Fried Chicken:
Link: https://www.yelp.com/biz/aburaya-japanese-fried-chicken-oakland-2
Off the Grid: Johnny Donuts:
Link: https://www.yelp.com/biz/johnny-doughnuts-san-francisco
Tenderloin: Saigon Sandwich:
Link: https://www.yelp.com/biz/saigon-sandwich-san-francisco
What I Did
Ethereum Meetup: Another exciting San Fransisco Ethereum meetup. I was in a hurry to get back to class, so I had to leave early, but I had time to grab some food at the Streat Food Park and chat about ETH. No matter how many of these I go to, I am always awestruck by how cool it is be a part of this crypto movement in the heart of Silicon Valley.
TechCrunch Disrupt SF Hackathon: After binge watching Silicon Valley in a week, I had to find a way to live the life of Richard Hendricks for a weekend. Luckily, I was able to secure five tickets to the weekend hackathon and got four of my Horizons classmates to join me for some hacking fun.
From the start, I knew this hackathon was unlike any other. It was housed in the historic Pier 48, an old warehouse that could house numerous football fields. More than 100 teams were competing for a handful of prizes and sponsors lined up along the wall, promoting their API's.
My team had a plan in mind: we sought to use Apple's ARKit and create a social photosharing experience. Unfortunately, none of us had used Swift very recently, and certainly none of us had any AR experience. So, the 24 hours were filled with the usual fustration, failure, breakthrough, repeat.
At the end, we hacked together a primitive, yet exciting prototype. Checkout the video above to see our demonstration (if you're as much of a fun as we are of Silicon Valley, you'll find our presentation quite entertaining).
Working with my classmates was an incredibly easy and productive experience. Since we code together 12 hours a day, 5 days a week, we were already used to pari programming. So, we split up the tasks and were able to use our combined strengths to build something in 24 hours none of us could have separately hacked together in a week.
Ultimately, we were earned a score of 3 or higher from all the judges and won 2 tickets to the TechCrunch Disrupt SF conference!
Conclusion
With week two in the books, it's hard to say, but it looks like the weeks are only getting better. This week I've already seen Vitalik Buterin, Joseph Poon, and OMG's founders speak twice and I attended a day of Tech Crunch Disrupt SF. But, those stories will have to wait for next week :)
Hope everyone had a wonderful week! I'll have to sign off here and get back to coding. Cheers and Steem on!