Travel Plans: BCN & AMS

September 15, 2014travelamsterdam, Barcelona, netherlands, Spain, travelCat B

Next week Tom’s brother and his girlfriend will arrive in Europe. They’ll be here for just over two weeks only, so we’ve decided to take them to two of our favourite places – Barcelona and Amsterdam.

We’ll spend a few days here in Montpellier, but although it’s a nice little city, it’s not very interesting for visitors. They will be our first visitors since we moved to France and I’m super excited for the chance to return to both Barcelona and Amsterdam.

We don’t really have any plans for what we will do, but I’m guessing we’ll be mostly focussed on eating delicious food, drinking delicious coffee and tasting lots of beers and wines. I think we’ll rent bikes in Amsterdam and maybe (if the weather is ok!) ride out to Haarlem one day. In Barcelona I would like to visit a museum or two since we have about a week there.

I’m also particularly looking forward to seeing all the BCN-based Ironhackers again! I miss their faces!

New Flickr set – Barcelona, August 2014

September 11, 2014photographyBarcelona, photography, photos, SpainCat B

I added a new photoset to Flickr for Barcelona in August. Click here to see the photos. There aren’t as many as I would have liked because we were so busy at Ironhack I simply didn’t have time!

I also added a few more to the end of the Barcelona July set.

Post-IronHack Planning

September 7, 2014internet, ironhack, thoughtscoding, finalist, hackshow, irohnack, presentationsCat B

It’s been just over a week since I left Barcelona and the Ironhack course. It was a truly incredible experience in a broader sense than I expected.

The final two weeks were spent working on a personal project developed using the technologies that we learned during the course. I had a great mentor (@mediafinger) and worked on a little project called Townbikes – an AirBnB-style site for specialty bikes. Check out the github repo or Heroku app. It was super-fun to work on something for ourselves: planning, creating, iterating and testing but it was also kind of strange to work by ourselves so much after spending so much time working in pairs or teams.

On the final Friday morning, we presented our projects to the rest of the class and a panel of judges. we spoke about the technologies we chose to use, how we implemented them and what worked or didn’t work for us. You can see the slides of my presentation here. After presenting to the class, I thought it was all over, but then the jury selected five projects to present later in the afternoon to an audience at the Hackshow. My project was selected… Continue reading Post-IronHack Planning →

How to recover from Ironhack in seven easy steps

September 1, 2014internet, ironhackcode, friends, internets, IronhackCat B

Step 1: Have a drink with your pals from the course

Step 2: Go home

Step 3: Sleep for 8 consecutive hours for the first time in 8 weeks

Step 4: Go for a 25km bike ride

Step 5: Do an hour of relaxing yoga

Step 6: Have a look at all the photos you took of your Ironhack friends and get a little weepy

Step 7: Keep coding

The home stretch

August 27, 2014changes, internet, ironhackBarcelona, feelings, Ironhack, web developmentCat B

So this week marks the final chapter in my Ironhack Bootcamp. It’s been a ride, that’s for sure! Last week we started our Final Projects – a web development project of our own choosing and structure. On Friday we present our projects and then on Saturday I head back to Real Life in Montpellier.

No project is the same as another, so it’s a really diverse mix of technologies and approaches. My project is a riff on the AirBnB model but for specialty bicycles and is built on Ruby on Rails with the front-end based on the Foundation framework. My approach was focussed on getting the main back-end functionality completed before beginning the front and that worked pretty well in my case. Continue reading The home stretch →