DEV Community: Ali Thompson

TCL-20 Recap

Ali Thompson — Sat, 06 Mar 2021 01:03:20 +0000

TCL-20 was one of our first “advanced” projects where developers take more responsibility for the work including contributing to project decisions such as story splitting and what features to build.

For this cohort we had four developers from previous Smart Shopping List projects return to build an app that lets you explore Wikipedia entries near you.

The app leverages the Google Maps API to render a map with pins pulled from Wikipedia's Nearby API. Users control whether to share their location with the app via the browser’s built-in geolocation API.

The app was built as a single-page, progressive web app using React.js deployed to Netlify via continuous deployment.

Check out the team’s work here!

Production app: Explore Your World (works great on your mobile device!)
GitHub Repo

Kudos

This team was the first advanced project team to implement search functionality within the app. This was a multi-week effort that saw every member of the team contribute, passing the code from one person to another, solving problems as they went, with Rachel taking ownership of the feature to guide it to completion.

Some of the standout traits and accomplishments of the team include the following:

Caitlyn taught the team about what it was like to work as a developer and compared her experiences in her position with her experiences with The Collab Lab. She is an excellent planner and did a great job of keeping the team on track.
DeVon was great at helping the team see the bigger picture on where the project was going. She consistently showed great confidence in the team and their ability to complete the project.
Rachel took ownership of the Search feature, determined to finish it. She researched, tried different ideas, and live-coded for the team as they worked through this difficult feature.
Shayne once again showed off his design skills and kept the team moving with his quick ability to summarize a problem or concept.

TCL-13 Recap

Ali Thompson — Sat, 05 Dec 2020 21:35:19 +0000

The latest cohort at Collab Lab wrapped up this week. We ran four teams concurrently for the first time and I had privilege of mentoring TCL-13 along with Indira Gutierrez, Eddie Solar and Andrew Hedges. TCL-13 consisted of Audra Turuta, Rebecca Bompiani, Shayne Sebro, and Rachel Fischoff. Over the span of 8 weeks our developers worked together to create a Smart Shopping List that predicts when you'll need to purchase items again using React, Firebase & Netlify.

From day one this group was sassy, supportive and cohesive. By our second weekly meeting it felt as though they had been working together as a group for much longer. They had a great cadence, scheduling pair programming and getting pull requests in early enough in the week for both peer and mentor reviews to take place. They scheduled extra meetings in addition to our weekly meeting when they had group decisions to make like choosing a design and a CSS framework. They were excellent at taking feedback about their project structure and implementing changes to make their coding experience in the future easier.

In addition to their programming skills, all of our participants brought their individual personalities and skills. Audra brought a great energy to the group. She was enthusiastic and created a space cohesive to collaboration. She is also skilled at taking a topic and breaking it down for explanation. Rachel put herself out there early in the project by giving a public lightning talk on caching. She asked great questions about different aspects of the project should or shouldn't be implemented in a certain way causing the team to do some great research before making decisions. Shayne gifted the group with his design skills and created beautiful design docs for the team to follow during the design portion of the project (shown below). He was positive, patient and thoughtful with his comments and questions. Rebecca dove into the documentation for each new library or framework the group used on the project and explained new concepts and ideas to the team.

Each week the mentors were newly impressed as the team embodied the purpose of Collab Lab by improving their programming and collaboration skills. It is our humble opinion that you should hire them ASAP.

React App Refactor - NOW FEATURING TESTING!

Ali Thompson — Tue, 08 Oct 2019 00:00:00 +0000

So Excited!!!!

I'm super excited about reworking this project. Meditation is a huge part of my day to day life and I like being able to look back and see what I've accomplished, see which types of meditation cause which mental changes, whether different times of day enhance or detract from the experience, etc.

The current iteration of the app isn't really all that useable to me. I can't wait to be able to move off of a tracking app that controls who gets my data and onto a self-hosted platform where I control my own data.

Refactoring My Meditation App

I've wanted to include more testing my projects for awhile now but many of the courses I took either didn't cover testing at all or skimmed over it briefly. I finally took the time to take a React testing course on Udemy and now I'm excited to get to refactoring my favorite project, My Meditation Timer & Tracker, using a Behavior Driven Development approach.

I recommend the course. It's React - Mastering Test Driven Development by David Joseph Katz. It is a bit old and I had to find some updated docs to get things to work, but the concepts are very sound.

What I'm doing different this time

SO MUCH TESTING. Really, really loving starting with a BDD approach. I'm so much more deliberate and organized this way.
I want to stick with exclusively React hooks this time. When I did the first run through I didn't understand hooks very well, and a lot of the documentation still only included Class examples. I'm a lot better with hooks now and they feel cleaner.
I'm completely ignoring styling for awhile. Part of the reason I want to use a BDD approach is that I can write my tests, create my components, get the functionality working and not be distracted by endless adjustments to margins and padding that would likely change in two days anyway.
I'm also debating whether or not to use a CSS framework. I used Material UI the first time around. It made putting the initial project together easier because I used Material UI Components. But it also left me feeling boxed into a corner as far as style goes a couple of times and I think I like the freedom of framework-less better. We'll see though.

Take a look and follow along

If I have the time and energy, I'm going to try to blog my process along the way. For now, take a look at my new repo and my first few issues:

App Needs Timer #1

AliLynne posted on Oct 08, 2019

Timer should:

Initially show a time of 00:00:00.
Should have a start button
- ~~should run an increment function when clicked.~~
Should have a Pause button
- ~~should run a Pause function when clicked.~~
Should have a save button
- ~~Should run a save function when clicked.~~

View on GitHub

Timer should Start, Pause, and Reset #3

AliLynne posted on Oct 08, 2019

Timer Should:

'when clicking start button' =>

Set timerOn state to true
set timerTime to current timerTime state
set timerStart time to current time: timerStart: new Date() - this.state.timerTime
set timer to setInterval

(will need to add a pause button) 'when clicking pause button' =>

set timerOn state to false
clear timer interval

'when clicking reset button' =>

set timerStart to 0
set timerTime to 0

View on GitHub

Hire Me

I'm looking for a new position. Please check out my projects page, my technologies and skills, and contact me at ali@alilynne.com if you're interested in hearing more!

365 Days of Meditation

Ali Thompson — Sun, 15 Sep 2019 00:00:00 +0000

365 Days Ago...

Really, it was about 350 or so days ago, when I realized that I'd managed to sit down and meditate every day for about two weeks straight, that I decided to see what happened if I meditated every day for the next year.

I did it! As of last night.

Why meditation?

I have PTSD. Some of my symptoms (and they differ for people) were anxiety around talking to people in person, night terrors, and general jumpiness at vaguely loud noises. It wasn't particularly fun to go through life jumping every time someone said 'hi' with any remote enthusiasm. I was in therapy, reading a lot of books and articles about PTSD, finally taking some good medication, but still not really enjoying life.

A couple of years ago my husband and I had the chance to take a Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction course that was recommended by my therapist. I recommend it (though I found it a bit ableist). We met with a group of people and a trained instructor once a week for 8 weeks (including a full day retreat). Much of the course is focused on learning to meditate, starting with body scanning. All of the course was useful to me, but the meditation seemed to have a particularly positive effect on my mood and mental health. I stuck with meditating after the course, but not on any regular schedule, just whenever I though about it.

Setting a goal

I wanted my goal to be simple. I knew the fewer barriers I put up for myself, the better. So I decided to 'Sit down and meditate every day.' That's it. I didn't set a time limit. I didn't pick a time of day. I wanted to find my own rhythm. What ended up happening is that I meditate for about 10 minutes or so before I sleep every night.

Primary Benefits

I didn't realize it before I started this journey, but I was apparently really bad at being able to articulate how my body was feeling. After I year of meditation I'm much better at being able to say 'I'm tired' or 'I need to rest.' Which means I've actually gotten a lot more rest this past year. Which means I've been a lot more productive and organized this past year.

I've also slept a whole lot better. I still have nightmares on occasion, but I can't remember the last time I had a night terror. Meditating before sleep has also helped me have better sleep hygiene through a bedtime routine.

For a lack of better way to explain it, I simply have more time to think. When someone asks me a question it no longer feels like it's coming at me like a screaming freight train that I have to dodge.

Secondary Effects

I can actually talk to doctors and tell them what they need to know to help me. Not knowing how my body felt meant that when I went to talk to doctors I had trouble saying much more than 'I don't feel well.' Which isn't particularly useful, as it turns out.

I'm also enjoying talking to people in general again. For a long time every conversation felt like a battle I was just trying to survive. It was really hard to pay attention to people, innocuous comments felt like knives, and five minutes in I was ready to run.

The Future

I have no plans to stop meditating any time soon. There will certainly be more posts to come about the specifics of my meditation. But specifically, I want to start a morning practice in addition to my evening practice.

While my sleep has improved and my days are a lot better, I'm hoping that a morning practice will help me start out my days with a bit more routine.

I'm also looking for work. Full time, part time, contract. - See my website. - www.alilynne.com

I Made Another Website

Ali Thompson — Fri, 30 Aug 2019 21:50:56 +0000

I Can't Help Myself

I stumbled onto Frontend Mentor a couple of weeks ago and I've finally gotten around to doing a challenge.

Frontend Mentor is a website that streamlines the process for practicing front end developers to create real projects. I've spent a lot of time lately working with Material Design/Material-UI and I felt like some of my CSS skills were getting rusty. I'd been using MD because it kept me from spending hours and hours trying to figure out exactly how I wanted to position components. Frontend Mentor does the same thing by giving me an already thought out design.

For my first challenge I went with one of the "Newbie" designated designs just to see what it was all about. And I can say that I love it and will be doing more of these. The downloaded file gave me all the images and font choices and the colors that I needed to create the design.

All I had to do was copy and paste it into my Gatsby hello-world starter and get to work creating components.

Check out the Design!

And my (not quite finished) Result!

Hoping to get to doing another one soon where I walk through my process of breaking the project down into parts and getting started.