Professional Max's Newfound Life in Tech

      Hello to my loyal fans. I hope you all have been having an excellent autumn/summer/spring/2022 since you last stopped by, hoping to find what was instead a mysteriously (and no doubt, frustratingly) absent fresh article from me. Apologies for keeping you waiting. But here it is!     Still, I hear you. "What", you might be asking, "could be so important that it would be worth pausing on committing to record these written anecdotes that so many of us have come to enjoy?". Well, I'll tell you what - I got a job! I got a job! I got a job!     Well, sort of. I got an internship. For several months this summer-through-fall I worked as a member of the Frontend Web Team at the Meal Kit delivery company Blue Apron . I was pretty excited for the opportunity. Not only would it be my first job in tech, but the food industry in general is something I've been an enthusiastic part of for most of my professional life. Not only was I excited to retain some sembla...

    If, for no one else, this post may wind up mostly for me. In that, I'm not trying to use it to communicate new information to you; I'm trying to keep track for myself, as a reference, a set of steps I've been instructed to take by another blog post . But, if it's not for other folks to read, why publish it at all? Well, the honest answer is: I also hope it can positively show my workflow, etc, in case someone else is looking to inspect my skills. Because, you see, it was a potential employer who sent me down this rabbit hole. Time to put my thinking cap on.     I should take a step back. In general, since my time in FlatIron School's Software Engineering Course, I have been really eager to keep my "backend" skills sharp, and been searching equally for "Frontend","Full Stack" and "Backend" entry level positions. Then, a company with a backend position got back to me :o     But, their Technical Interview is not at all what I...

    Hello, my loyal fans. Good news from my world - tomorrow I'm starting not just a new job, but a new (to me)  kind of job: I'm going to be a tutor! In this case, specifically, I'm going to be a Coding Tutor. And, even more specifically, I'm going to tutor Elementary School kids.     But (and this is the twist): I'm not going to be tutoring them in Javascript, HTML, CSS or the other languages I learned at the FlatIron School. I'm going to teach them a language specifically meant as an introduction to the possibilities of code; a language that works on a much more visual/click-and-drag basis, as a way of getting kids excited about the possibilities that coding can unlock. I'm talking about Scratch . Aww, lookit that cute cat     On first introduction, the language surprised me, or even made me skeptical, as something worth learning. Allegorically speaking, I have an abundance of fond memories playing on the software KidPix when I was a child, bu...

     I write you now, on a blog that was created as a requirement for a class, as a Graduate of that class ( hooray! ). But, like all good things in life, this space as an idea for musings has taken on a life of its own, and so I feel compelled to share another thought from the tech world I had: when did Gmail become the standard for online email? Seriously - in the Career Services literature that's given to every student following said class, this office - in charge of helping students find work in the field of technology - has this ("hot") take:  Email Address(es) : Should be @gmail.com @me.com or @customdomain. Avoid AOL, Hotmail or Yahoo email accounts because employers may view users with those accounts as out-of-touch or not tech savvy.     Reading this, I felt the sting of injustice (actually, more like embarrassment). I use a Yahoo email account! In fact - I have since high school! And what's wrong with that? It works just fine! And as my Grandpapp...

    This article was inspired by a technical error I can't replicate through writing, nor refer to in official documentation (unless I missed something ). The overhead digital projector in one of the classrooms I attend, in between displaying its computer signal and a neutral, soothing blue screen displayed something curiously familiar: tv static. you may be familiar...     For a brief instant, the "snow" felt oddly comforting. It made me think of old movies in the basements of old houses. It reminded me that  Hunter Thompson liked to fall asleep to white noise  (white noise, side note, actually having some  therapeutic benefit? ). It made me wonder if my teacher needed to climb on the roof and adjust the antenna.      Then it hit me: what the heck? Technically speaking/as this  helpful reddit page  explains, tv static was originally the cause of an internal mechanism within the television: the amplifier, normally in charge of ...

    A few weeks ago, I had a moment of pretty serious Imposter Syndrome. A coding meetup group, called Rust-NYC , decided to host its meeting at the Flatiron School, where I spend my days taking classes. A coding meetup logically seemed like the a great place to meet likeminded folks. It was only after the meeting had started, and I started chatting with people, that I realized how far in, over my head, I had gotten.     It turns out: 1) Rust isn't just a clever name for the group (in its reference to the short lived nature of hardware/in that the group also never sleeps ), it's also the name of the language they all practice, and meet to discuss. 2) Rust has fewer formal applications in the market place - which means the folks there are also devoting their hard earned free time (and free brain space) to more coding and programming and syntax and refactoring and debugging and and and... The imposter syndrome set in when I realized that this kind of meetup (despite it...

      This blog post will be slightly off the kilter of my usual writing. Not that I don't want it to be funny or engaging, but I'm not writing it with the same lighthearted intention that I've written about other, less-consequential topics like how to create tally marks or what I made my first website about. This post is also meant to be less results-oriented; there's no final product I want to show off or "behind the scenes" descriptor I'm writing. Instead, I want to use this entry as a jumping off point for discussing an issue that seems to be plaguing every aspect of society nowadays: the rise and dominance and social destruction as a result of: Facebook.     But, in particular, I've been curious: what role has their software-baby, ReactJS, played in this power struggle? It's been a hard question to answer definitively. For one, news coverage seems very intently focused on "one side" or "the other":     -It's very easy t...