Developing Insights

10 weeks are in the books, and for most of us that has meant 80-100 hour weeks, and pushing into the first 10th of the 10,000 hour rule. The culmination of the whole process, arguably more than hiring day tomorrow, is demo day.

For the final two weeks of Dev Bootcamp, the cohort is split into teams of four or five and we hack away at our final projects. Today - demo day - was the day we shared the fruits of our labor, and the quality of work was phenomenal. It’s a humbling thing to have worked with this company of people:

(apologies - Tumblr doesn’t support tables well)

Verbza - A mobile first flashcard generating app. Particularly in the context of learning a new language, a user can take pictures of an object, associate a word with it and a definition, and save that card for later review. Integrated with S3 for images, set up to respond solely in json, and tested with jasmine.

Apprentice Hour - An app to find a mentor. Use it to post or respond to a mentor request. They built valid transitioning from scratch.

Filters.io - A response to the walled garden of filtering photos – it’s hard to filter a photo if it’s not already on a mobile device a la Instagram – its a photo filtering service with as streamlined a user experience as possible. They dealt with cross origin resource sharing and integrated filepicker.io.

Instatap.es - My team and I wanted to make it easy to share mix tapes without having to sign up for any particular service. Users can choose any songs they want, customize their cassette, give it a great title, and share it with friends via facebook, twitter, or email.

Fabawag - “Find a bar and watch a game”, maps bars to google maps api using the geolocater gem. Bars sign up and can make an affiliation with a game and users can see what local bars are repping their favorite team.

Hang your boots - If you’re an incoming Dev Bootcamp student, this makes it easy find housing in the area.

Wi-Chai - Makes it easy to find a good coffee bar to work from. Utilizes the Yelp api and GeoHelper.

Drive - an online community for car enthusiasts that seeks to update the look and feel of comparable sites.

Reposado - visualize user engagement with open source projects on GitHub. Show top contributors, track the average time it takes to make a response to pull requests, and shows top word frequency. They utilized event machine.

All Day Fantasy - Makes analyzing and choosing fantasy basketball teams easy. Great use of ajax to update players and statistic, and even better use of cron jobs (players are updated every ten minutes during gameplay and daily to assess who is available to play).