Day 58: Phone interviews and working more on the UI of TrainerExpress

This morning I had two phone interviews from prospective employers. One was for a front-end developer position at a major fitness company and the second one was from a tech consulting company.

The interviewer for the tech company asked a bunch of technical questions regarding front-end development. Although I know a lot of these things in actually implementation, I had a difficult time answer specific technical vocabulary questions (e.g. What's the difference between progressive enhancement and graceful degradation). The interviewer was nice enough to give me the answer he was looking for so that I can be better prepared for the next one. All in all, I don't expect to be moved forward with the next step of the process. It was a humbling yet great learning experience from my first interview.

The second one was for a tech consulting team that's trying to expand to Seattle. They are quite present around the world but they're looking to fill their tech needs in this new market. The phone interview just composed of simple questions about me and my background. He then sent me an email containing a few algorithm questions. They were so simple that it kind of threw me off guard. I made sure that I submitted the most efficient algorithm to my knowledge. There will be more of these coding challenges in the future which will be much harder I'm sure. I think this first one was to weed out extreme beginners. I expect to get a second coding challenge in the future.


After those two interview in the early afternoon, I was actually pretty exhausted. Being that they were my first phone interviewers with actual hiring managers instead of recruiters, I was very nervous. After taking a long break, I started continuing my project.

Here is a quick snapshot of the finished page of my application.

My brain is definitely fried and feeling the pressure of finding a job. I just need to remind myself that this can become a long process and that I should really take things one day at a time.

Day 57: Designing the User Interface for TrainerExpress

I'm getting another step closer to having my application "launchable".

Today I focused most of my time on the User Interface for my application. It's probably the section that I'm weak at but me being a perfectionist, I still had to make it look pretty good.

Here is me taking a photo and tinting it just a little bit so that my the white font can be visible. I had such difficulty making the white text look good because it would blend it with the sky, making it really difficult to read. However I asked one of my classmates who is a designer and he suggested that I just tint it just by 10 to 20% and it'll make the white text visible while keeping the picture bright.

Simply brilliant. There's a reason why we have designers in this world in addition to developers. I also asked him to take a look at more of my application and help with the UI. I'll be doing most of the coding of it but it'll really help getting a designer's eyes on it.

I'm really excited to get this out there on my portfolio.

I'm still having plenty of recruiters calling me. This project should be good to go in about 2 more days. I give it another day for the UI and another day to get the other stuff done like a solid "ReadMe" file and resume updates.

Although I may sound really ecstatic on this post, in reality today was really difficult because I had such difficulty figuring out what would actually look good. But all in all, some progress is better than no progress and I'm just excited to be one step closer to finishing my project.

Day 56: Finished all basic features of TrainerExpress

All throughout the weekend, I worked on the necessary functions of my fitness application. Users can login/sign up, create their own workout routines, see a list of all routines, and initiate a workout routine session. As of now when users begin their routine, they can only click next for you to continue onto the next step. I plan on using some voice recognition so that users can say the word "Next" to continue to the next step.

I'm extremely comfortable with Angular and how they have the code structures in controllers, views, and factories. There's a lot of demand and I'm sure many hiring managers will be impressed with the code that I have produced.

Here's a quick glimpse of what the user interface looks like on the last step of a workout routine.

For the rest of the night, I'm going to figure out how to use PhoneGap to make sure that I can get this to become a mobile app!

Day 55: More progress on TrainerExpress

After about 8 more hours of working on TrainerExpress, I've gotten about 50% done with the application. I definitely need to come in on the weekend and go hard on it next week to make sure everything looks great.

Javascript is a difficult language in that it is extremely difficult to debug when you make an error. Hence it's taking me much longer to do everything. Furthermore, the lack of structure in a NoSQL database in MongoDB makes this much more difficult to enter into the Database. But nevertheless, I am still making relatively good progress. I give myself maybe 2 more full days until all the functionality is perfect. After that it's all about making the UI beautiful and exporting it into a mobile app.

Here is just a quick snapshot of the user homepage with available workout routines. On the right is the database structure for my application.

I'm not the only one here staying late working on my projects there's a good handful of us really working our butts off making sure that our portfolios are looking sharp. Definitely gotta keep going strong at this and secure a developer job that I actually want!

Day 54: Working on TrainerExpress

Today I started my ambitious day on working hardcore on my application.

I did not get nearly done as much as I wanted to. Honestly if I was doing a Rails application I would've completed all 7 of my objectives.

But after one day of working on this, I only ended up barely completing 1. Ouch... I kept running into little bugs and difficulties connecting the pieces together. Not to mention I am a little rusty on Angular, Express, and MongoDB.

The thing I had the most difficult with was rendering the partials properly.

I was constantly asking my classmates and instructors for help on fixing bugs. I probably asked more than I ever did on any other day during the bootcamp.

Since this is going to be on my personal portfolio, I really want to make sure it looks good and presentable to hiring managers and others.

Day 53: Meeting with Recruiter, Wireframe approval, building Front-End of Project

Once again I woke up to phone calls from Recruiters starting at 8AM. Those ones are usually from the East Coast. The number one skill that is in highest demand is Angular. I have gotten 90% of my calls because I have Angular listed on my resume. The other 10% were simply Front-End Development. At around 9:30 I got a call from a recruiter who's office was about 3 minutes away from where I lived so I went ahead and scheduled a meeting with him.

The meeting was surprisingly good. There really are a lot of opportunities out there. The recruiters wanted to push my application forward but it's difficult when I don't have any projects live. I really need to make progress on my projects so that's exactly what I did today.

First things first I wanted my personal website up and running even though I'm not 100% satisfied with it. I already had a domain from GoDaddy and hosted my site using HostMonster. It can be found at www.tedwhang.com

It's also responsive!

In the picture below I have my wireframe and my rough draft of my rendered code. I didn't want to over spend time figuring out the design as there might be some changes when implementing the back-end. I'll definitely be retouching the front-end repeatedly throughout the development process.

After a good days of building the front-end and making sure that my wireframe is approved, I decided to spend the rest of my time figuring out what I'll aim to accomplish tomorrow.

It's ambitious but I want to build all necessary functions tomorrow.

Enough talking about me all the time. Here a quick snapshot of a project one of my classmates is doing. It's a javascript game where the characters are based off of the Legend of Zelda.

I love how Coding Dojo doesn't restrict you from building what you want. Whatever interests you and will put you in the best position to go whatever direction you desire is what you can build. There are no limits here!!!

Day 52: Recruiters and Project Wireframes

First thing I was to state is that yesterday I posted my updated resume to a website called Dice and I have literally received 6 calls from different recruiters. Literally one call every hour this morning from 8 to noon and 2 more in the afternoon.

Some of them really had poor English skills and it was difficult to communicate with them. I definitely don't want to work with them but I was polite as they might end up having some opportunities that I'll be really interested in.

I didn't really have any live projects up so it was difficult to get to the next step but the recruiters just wanted to get to know me and my background and see how they can help me get employed.

After all is said and done, I am still surprised by the shear number of people that called me.


I must say I was pretty lazy and sluggish this week but all these calls really built a sense of urgency to start working on those darn projects!!!


I have two applications in mind: One is a textbook marketplace app and another one is a personal trainer app.

Here is a quick wireframe of the personal trainer app:

Michael Choi wants to take a look at everyone's wireframes before we start so that we don't run into dumb roadblocks or mistakes.

I'll be continuing my app building so that I have something to show hiring managers!