It's in the Midwest. Not surprised if some places do the same thing, just look into feedback and see how people review it. Way more available feedback online than when I went.

Pretty sure hack reactor is good tho. Like 5 stars over 100+ ratings on yelp

Yes, that is correct. The arrangement is not satisfiable, and it is what CLRS uses to introduce NP-hard.

It is fun!
I remember feeling a lot of joy programming gates. Things like n-adders and other arrangements was good stuff.

Entrance tests are extremely common. The best schools have more applicants than they can teach do they use the tests as a filter and a way to ensure people come in with some baseline.

A poor school might also issue a test to elicit a sense of accomplishment at being accepted and lend some credibility to their program.

So a test by itself doesn't really signal anything.

The only way you can evaluate these bootcamps is by speaking to their graduates. For some of the larger, longer standing schools online reviews and blog posts may be enough.

Hack Reactor at least for a while was pretty open with the data about their graduate outcomes. They've generally got a good reputation online from what I've seen and are widely considered to be one of the top boot camps.

It's a bit concerning that you're starting HR so soon and apparently did very little research into your options.

Anyways if i were to do a boot camp again, hack reactor would be among about 5 places I would consider.

I suggested to the mods of this forum a weekly/month thread lc/nc thread (hopefully not lc/nc) where we tell about cool things we learned in that period of time.

A really simple example of something I learned in git bash recently was how to "pull" something from a different branch so you can access it in your current branch (in the form of a temp file, some copy and paste sill required if you need specific parts of that "pulled" file).

You might ask "how is this useful". If you want to to access a file from another branch in bash without changing branches you would have to do a combo of git commit, git stash, git rest --mixed, and git reset --soft ~HEAD to accomplish the same task.

What do you guys think? I think we could potentially learn a lot of cool things from each other!

By all means go for it imo

Super easy - basically one of the things AHK is made to do.

Something like:

That would send over and again every 10 seconds.

Sweet! I'll start a thread sometime this weekend then

It would be cool if everyone that lurks could learn at least one neato shortcut or at least how to do everything in the CLI. I'm the only one in my team that uses Bash and I'm the most junior developer by at least a decade. It kind of saddens me that the "real" programmers are still heavily reliant on a GUI interface. I think that makes sense for some tasks like looking at the current state of the db (after updating the db when you delete, insert, etc). But for such a simple task like pushing your latest code?

Kind of a low traffic forum, maybe do quarterly? Seasonally?

I mean, if I had my way, everyone would treat this place as a chat room for shooting the **** and post any inane, random thought they had

I have another question from the "not sure how to google for it" stack. There's a bunch of object oriented design type of books and resources (how to model stuff, how to find good abstractions etc.).
Anyone with good suggestions for "functional modelling" for lack of a better word? Just for kicks I started to think about the basic abstractions I'd choose if I'd build an ERP from scratch in a functional manner and I noticed that I'm not really good at it and tended to revert to OO abstractions.

Really curious how one goes about this generally. My guess is think long and hard about data structures and generic functions and what data they should take as inputs and provide as outputs.

I was trying to create some sort of abstract model for an ERP and in OOP terms would split it into Resource, Product, Document and Activity on the highest level and some sort of Container/Bundle concept (could go higher and have Item or Entity or something)

The two aren't as opposed as mainstream practice would suggest.

https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/boundaries

and also the "functional core, imperative shell" talk mentioned there. OO design that favors immutable value objects was a huge epiphany for me.

Random good intros to functional programming concepts:

http://raganwald.com/ (scroll down to the 3 talks called "The Art of the JavaScript Metaobject Protocol") These are really terrific.

http://scott.sauyet.com/Javascript/T...nalProgramming
Another nice intro which walks through converting a simple example from an OO to a purely functional style.

There's a lot of good stuff out there, you just have to know where to look.

What language are you using? Can you describe the trouble you're into with your current problem?

I hate hackathons. Never want to go to one ever again. People are weird. Sponsored companies want free labor. Companies trying to shove their API in your face. And trying to complete anything in 36 hours is pointless. Don't go to one ever.

Aren't most of the projects completed ahead of time ?

I don't know how to do OOP, so can't compare here, but for the most part, you shouldn't have any problems programming in a way that is functional / immutable. The only part that should be persistently mutable is the login session. The rest is kind of hand-wavy non-mutable, but as long as you are passing values to functions and getting back a consistent answer, you win.

There's quite a few projects online using Haskell, Clojure, etc. Many of them use the classic MVC pattern, then break the files into things that are logically put together. A common pattern is creating a file called "utils," which handles a lot of common abstractions that are found throughout the system, and another called users, which handles things like login / logout items.

The idea is to do things in layers, with the bottom layer being things that are found pretty much everywhere, up to a layer that is individual to the page / entity you are trying to deal with. I'm thinking it isn't too far afield from normal OOP, and surely is influenced.

The FP world doesn't rail against OOP, just the persistent mutation and the various design patterns that are used to contain it. This doesn't mean that you shouldn't use any of the GOF design patterns; rather, you are free to disregard the patterns if they don't make sense the application you are writing, which would appear to make sense no matter if you are going extreme OOP or FP, yeah?

You mean before the hackathon? Yea probably, I have a feeling most people start their projects a week before the hackathon begins.

Amazing post, thank you. I was just trying to lay the groundwork and felt like I ran into some trouble doing initial planning. Doesn't have to be a functional language but I want to keep things as immutable as possible.
The plan is to use Elixir (or revert back to Erlang if I don't like Elixir) which might require somewhat different modelling yet again

I'll also give Java 8 a fair shot + am considering 100% JS

I've only very briefly played with Elixir, but it's all the rage among a lot of old rubyists now, and seems very nice to me. Basically, ruby with forced immutability and nice piping syntax from what I can tell. That seems like a great choice if you're trying to learn more functional programming.

If you go with JS, check out the ramda.js library.

I think with Java, even with its recent improvements, you'll still be fighting the language somewhat, but in fairness I haven't used it much in years.

I think it's interesting that you see Elixir form the Ruby perspective. I see it from the other side so to speak. For me it's "an interesting syntax to use the BEAM VM and the Erlang libraries/OTP"
But with my Prolog background I'm not sure I want the different syntax and might stick with Erlang instead.

Elixir is likely to pick up some extra steam because Phoenix (web framework) is coming along nicely, it has reached 1.0 by now iirc and there's a beta book from pragprog which is usually a good sign.

I have played with Java 8 a bit and it's fairly nice but I agree with your assessment that the language will still be in the way often. Static typing has its pros and there's some things I want to play with where Java is the natural choice (Petri Net based simulation, external DSL -> ANTLR)

Looking forward to xmas vacation that's for sure

The acceptance challenges are "real" in the cases of App Academy and Hack Reactor, which claim to accept around 5% and 3% of applicants, respectively. App Academy only charges after you've gotten a job and partly for that reason I have a feeling their number is overstating the acceptance rate if anything. I'd probably recommend HR, would cautiously recommend AA, and would point you to Flatiron School's audit report of job placement figures to investigate for yourself (they seem legit).

I can say with a high degree of confidence that Hack Reactor (the on-site version) as of the beginning of the summer was placing almost all graduates very fast (within weeks, mostly) in high-paying jobs in SF. App Academy's claimed 98% placement rate (within one year of graduation) as of 2014 is probably true, but the job search now seems to be taking longer for graduates (months). HR I think does a good amount of placement work for you whereas with AA you're more on your own with guidance.

As for other bootcamps I mostly wouldn't trust them unless you can dig deep and get credible and specific answers on questions like job placement rates and money-back guarantees and average salaries. If they say their thing is to teach passionate people and it's about the process and not the result, tell them to f off.

Victor make sure the money-back guarantee thing is specific (length of time, minimum salary, can you get hired for one day and then fired) and clear and relatively scamproof.

I'm slightly hesitant about all bootcamps including the ones I mentioned not because I doubt their recent-past and maybe current results, but because I'm leery about the near-future potential. With so many bootcamps around, isn't the competition for entry-level programming jobs going to get super fierce?

Definitely really weird that you're so unclear on the details here, but you're in good shape, they're legit. You're doing the on-site one?

static typing + nice syntax + FP + xmas vacation = haskell??

Of course YMMV but one of our product lines started in a hackathon. Our hackathons are a way to let the devs blow off steam and prototype ideas that aren't on Products radar. It's also a way to for people in the company that don't interact with the devs to meat them and see what they do. I thought they were a fairly standard way to innovate.

officially being considered for one of the now 4 jobs I've applied for.

Just when I thought I might have to pick up and move to SF and go to Hack Reactor or something

I had to leave the house early to get into the office to avoid the maid service, and then leave the office early to get home for the grocery delivery service.

I have just lived the whitest day of all time.

Sounds like a good idea.

Biggest face palm today when my data structures teacher thought that when you use the new operator in a function, that it wouldn't survive after the scope ends unless it returned it.

For example:

She said she would have to check on that :\.

She stated that it only survives if you returned it in a function. So foo() would have to return the reference to it.

What you would have there is a memory leak. bar is still allocated, but you have no way to reference it.

I would really like to hear your professor's explanation as to what she thinks a return statement does and why she thinks that would have anything to do with whether a free store (essentially heap) variable is still allocated or not?