I do this excellent thing where I forget to post to my blog in umpteen years and it stinks. I’m mainly dissapointed in myself because I know there were a lot of life milestones that I forgot to write down in there and remembering all the things I did is a tall order, but I’ll try.

####Job hunt Let’s see, an update on the job hunt. ** I do not have a job ** I have had interviews ** Everyone in this community is EXTREMELY helpful ** I’m excited to start somewhere as a developer

That is the list version and the long one isn’t much different. I’ve completed some coding challenges, done a few other interview-related tasks but have not landed that dream job quite yet. It is pretty amazing to hear back from potential employers about their admiration of DBC or the fact that my coding challenge was really good for someone that started 9 weeks ago. DBC has definitely prepared us for the future and taught us really cool tricks to help us along the way.

####Hack 4 Social Good LGBT Homelessness Resource Page

On a non job realted item, I attended a super fun hackathon with another DBC alumnus, Duke Greene. We flexed our coding skills and that was about the first time I realized that what DBC had taught me was real. Inisde of the space, it is safe and friendly and you only match up against other coders that started this new adventure at the same time you did. In that aspect, we all seem like rockstars. It wasn’t until I left the space, mixed in with non DBC alumnus (well, except for 1) and saw for myself that in just 9 (or 19) short weeks, you become a world-class Junior. I was leading my teams Rails scope with just one other rails developer on my team. She was also a fresh grad, from Starter League…I think, but I felt that we had become more prepared from DBC.

The hackathon honestly solidifed my trust in DBC and I highly encourage ALL alumnus to go to one to see just how much you learned. The project we worked on was actually the product of a different hackathon and the project manager just wanted to handle some issues posted to the repo/update the overall look. The site is an incredibly necessary resource for the LGBT Youth Community and I was extremely proud to be a part the team.

####Timesheets for Mom 7 Angels Timesheet

The final update since my last post has to do with a few really important things in my life.
#1, my mom
#2, empowering small businesses

My mom does the timesheets at her and my dad’s restaurant. About 3 years ago I put in a system to handle this, but the system was run on a localhost and I had NO IDEA how it worked. I was perplexed but realized it was a free software and that was about the only kind they have a budget for.

Well, over the past 6 or so months, we have had some issues with the hardware and everytime I came home I found myself troubleshooting hours of untracked time sheets. The software I had instaleld to make my mom’s life easier was actually complicating it. On a Sunday morning I decided to build her a new one. Insert some rails, JS, and AJAX calls and she now has a timesheet management system that allows her employees to punch in from their mobile devices. Of course I had to account for an employee trying to clock in from home so I used Google Maps API to geolocate, requiring the employee to be within .25 miles of the business.

If she has any hang-ups in the system, I can login and fix the errors. Even better, I have it hosted on Heroku so I can adjust things in the code as they come up. This tool is currently setup for single use but if any business finds the need to use a system like this, feel free to reach out to me. I will never charge you for the software, you just need to find a spot to host it. That is my point #2. I feel that small businesses need to be allowed access to intuitive software to help them focus on what they really care about, their customers. This task used to take my mom a few hours every so often and we wasted countless boxes of timecard sheets. Saving a few bucks on ink and paper makes all the difference to people like my mom and dad.