03 October 2014

Hackbright Day 4 and the Eventbrite Girl Geek Dinner

Today was the fourth day of class. We talked about list slicing in the lecture in the morning. I still have a lot of questions about it, but they're still mostly answerable by playing around with toy scripts or even in the python interpreter. The exercise today was basically writing list functions from scratch using only slice operators. I find list slicing to be incredibly frustrating. I think part of it is that it's different than what I'm used to in Fortran and also that it's not something that i immediately caught on to. My partner and I never finished the exercise, but I will definitely be working on it tomorrow.  Today was also picture day, which is never a good day for me. They mollified all of us by giving us Hackbright branded graph paper notepads. I guess it made it better. Or something.

In the afternoon, we talked about lists, iteration, and memory allocation. Apparently, if you don't pay attention to your variable assignment, you can have memory leaks by having things that are no longer connected to anything that is being kept track of in the code, but are connected to other unconnected areas in allocated memory. This makes python think that this shouldn't be cleaned up during garbage collection. This is not something I'm super concerned about right now, but it's another good thing to tuck in the back of my mind for when I'm working on my project and it runs crazy slow. I was totally having flashbacks to the pointers lectures in CSE 231, but I gritted my teeth and made sure I understood it this time around.

After classes, a subset of us headed to Eventbrite for the Girl Geek Dinner. It was pretty awesome. The food was great, there was a lot of alcohol (that I didn't touch because my tolerance is about nil at this point), and I actually tried to network a bit. Eventbrite seems like a great place to be and the company culture is awesome and caring of both their employees and customers and forward thinking. And they also hire Hackbright grads and they're looking for data scientists. I should probably start looking into data science Coursera programs right about now. We also got some fancy GGD swag, in the form of a really nice, sturdy tote bag, a pen, and a GGD branded moleskine. Two notebooks in one day? IS THIS REAL LIFE?

And I realize that this post is a bit thin and I have no pictures of code, but it's sort of late and I spent a lot of time playing around with chremacs and some horrible python-for-chromebooks to attempt to do the homework. I really just need to get my shit together and install Chrubuntu.

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