February 05, 2017
Is the teetering tottering scale model of life, with it’s ups and its downs, an oversimplification of what we really go through? People seem very content talking about their lives in the context of days and nights, hours awake and hours asleep. We seem hardwired into believing that highs are followed by lows and lows are followed by highs.
I shall proceed at once to point out the person who first within my own knowledge inflicted injury on the Greeks, after which I shall go forward with my history, describing equally the greater and the lesser cities. For the cities which were formerly great have most of them become insignificant; and such as are at present powerful, were weak in the olden time. I shall therefore discourse equally of both, convinced that human happiness never continues long in one stay.
And yet I don’t remember thinking this way as a child. I remember there was a time when I thought happiness had nothing to do with sadness… that there was no cycle that took place in the human emotion.
The past few days I have missed out on writing posts and I hope not to make that a habit.
A few things I need to cover (in coming posts):
Over the course of the week I’ve been taking part in Devfest, Columbia’s week long learnathon followed by an 18 hour hackathon. Learning-wise, I really enjoyed learning how to use Flask. Although I’m definitely no Flask master, I’ve gotten a better feel for Flask’s similarities to, say, Node.
In addition, I met some amazing people at the learnathon, some of which I later worked with at the hackathon.
One of the workshops I went to, React, got me interested in coding up a project w/ React and Firebase at the Hackathon. I may have gotten greedy with my expectations. 18 hours is a short amount of time.
I worked in a team of 5 people, programming a tinder-esque dating app where you get no choice who you match with, but you get to swipe/match other people. Now that I think of it, the complications that would arise out of such an app are really crazy. However, it was a project that our mentors thought was funny and we were pumped to start building it.
We started off with trying to handle authentification. To do this, we eventually settled on using Firebaseui. What followed afterwards was a fully-fledged bonanza. We tried to learn React, primarily because we wanted to compartmentalize the different views in the app (login, matching, matches, etc.). However, and I’ll accept blame for this, for our current level of experience, this lofty goal consumed too much of our time. In the end, we actually got so far as storing the current user data. Next steps would be to handle the logic of matching other users. However, I don’t think we’re going to keep going with the code we created in the Hackathon.
The idea remains fairly fresh. As such, I’m going to keep learning React as well as es6 in order to try to make this app in my own time. If teammembers are interested in working on it, I’ll be happy to work with them. Honestly, I think we had a great team. We even had a Rick & Morty break (lol).
Although I’m sure my words read like mud, I’m proud of the work we did over those 18 hours. For a first Hackathon, we did not do half bad. In addition, my interest for React and Firebase has been sparked. The potential uses for full fledged mobile apps to this very website mean I’ve got to learn to use these technologies.