Chris Guzman

Presenting at my first conference

9/25/16
At Groupon we set goals for our annual reviews. The goals I set this year include giving two talks at local meetups and to also give a talk at a national conference. This year I was able to achieve both of those. Though admittedly I did accomplish them in a more backwards manner then you would expect.

In April after signing up for the Technically Speaking newsletter, I discovered that 360 An|Dev was coming up and was looking for talk submissions. I started talking to my co-worker and de facto mentor Cody about possible talk ideas. We both submitted about 2-3 talk ideas each. In May I got an email say I was accepted!

The conference was in July and I had not begin to put together any slides or concepts for the talk. Luckily COdy had my back and suggested that I give test versions of the talk at our local GDG Baltimore Meetup and Groupon's internal Android Talk Night.

After giving the practice versions of the talk I was confident that I had enough materials for a 35-45 minute talk. I spent many night practicing, reading docs to understand the material better, and trying to think of funny hooks and jokes for the talk. The talk went through many iterations. First there was no theme where I basically read READMEs for various libraries (too boring). Then I made it Pokemon themed using various gifs and puns on Pokemon names. I'm glad I didn't go with that theme since a lot of presentations at 360|AnDev shared a Pokemon theme.

After talking to Cody about the presentation and what it was missing we agreed that it needed a cohesive narrative for why you should use all of these libraries in your Android app. We thought it would be a good idea if the talk revolved around building a simple app and how these libraries work well together. Then literally the week before I decided to start the talk off by presenting a hypothetical app called TAaSTY- Tinder for Tacos.

Running the idea past friends I got a few laughs so I decided that was the way to go. I had written the presentation in markdown and was using Deckset to present so changing the theme was super easy.

After practicing a few more times (even again an hour before I went on stage) I was ready to go. I had a lot of fun on stage and I'm glad (most) of my jokes went over well.

During the Q&A I did get asked a question I didn't know the answer to. Luckily though, a member of the audience knew the correct answer and I was able to repeat their response. I assume at most conference there will be someone there that knows a bit about the subject your presenting on.

If you'd like to check out my talk. The folks at Realm filmed it. Go check it out!

https://realm.io/news/360andev-chris-guzman-android-libraries-beginner/

Immersion

4/9/14

I am an enthusiastic learner. After I graduated college I found that I was still eager to educate myself on various topics. Listening to NPR one day, I heard about Udacity. I heard on reddit many times that coding is one of the best skills you can have, and Udacity seemed like a great way to start my learning. I found a passion in web development after taking Udacity’s CS 101 course. I continued to advance my education by enrolling in MOOCs and completing various tutorials.

When I want to learn something I find it’s best to immerse myself in the subject matter. That’s why I lived, worked, and volunteered in Guatemala for a few months to study Spanish. Similarly, in learning web development I have immersed myself by taking part in hackathons and startup weekends. I listen to podcasts like This Developer's Life, Hacker News Nation, Ruby5, Boagworld, Technical.ly's Podcast, and Giant Robots Smashing into other Giant Robots.

The class at Betamore, the hackathons, and the podcasts have truly accelerated my learning. I'm bragging a bit here but my team won Bitcamp’s Most Impactful Health App for Trailblaze, a social gamified life goal tracker. Another team I was on placed third in Startup Weekend Lancaster for our travel planning website (still in progress!). I don't think any of this would be possible without the efforts I've taken to immerse myself.

Turning the tables on recruiters

2/25/14

I attended the NET/WORK Baltimore event on Thursday, February 20th. I'm not currently looking for a job, but I may be after the Betamore course ends. So I figured I would interview the recruiters about how I can make myself a more appealing candidate. Here are some questions I thought appropriate:

The answer I got back from many of recruiters was the same advice anyone will hear if they're looking to get started in web development: make something! More specifically make something and talk about it. Start a blog (check) and a twitter (check). Update your LinkedIn (check), GitHub (check) and attend meetups (check). You should be talking about what you're learning and what you're making on all of these networks!

BEWD 2nd Class

2/21/14

We spent class time completing the entire Git Immersion tutorial. Going over git immersion with an instructor is very helpful. The tutorial doesn’t answer all of your questions and you will get stuck. But one rule I'm forcing myself to follow is to not ask for help unless I've spent more than 15 mintues trying to solve the problem on my own. It's a strategy I picked up from another blogger who attended a different bootcamp.

Some strategies I picked up doing the Git Immersion tutorial:

Some random advice from Paul: He uses bitbucket for personal, non open source projects- it's private hosting of git repositories for free. He recommend we consider checking out all of the stuff at The Pragmatic Bookshelf including the video about git.

What we covered in BEWD's first class

2/13/14

Paul showed us how he sets up his dev environment which includes:

The general layout of the course will be a flipped classroom. We will go over lessons outside of class and then code in class with our mentor. So they definitely encourage learning on your own.

I plan on learning more ruby on my own with code school and Learn Ruby The Hard Way.