Loves Computers

Flatiron School Instruction

Apr 2018 to Apr 2019

education OOP MVC ORM Linux JWT React Ruby on Rails Redux react-router JavaScript Ruby

This is a collection of many of my lecture videos and live code from my time teaching as a Lead Instructor at Flatiron School. I’ll be updating this page as I go through them and eventually pick out the most memorable lectures.

Most Memorable Lectures

Advanced React

• Video
• Code

I came down with bronchitis which caused me to lose my voice during this rotation. However, since we were shortstaffed, I decided to bite the bullet and figure out a way to continue delivering instruction.

The solution?

I scripted an entire lecture and delivered it in a way that best utilized my ability to lead students to conclusions and questions so I could pre-write answers. I also wrote a React Native app to allow me to do text-to-speech so I could answer student questions outside of lecture.

Redux Series

• Predux
  • Video
  • Code
• Redux
  • Video
  • Code
• React Redux
  • Video
  • Code
• Reduxions
  • Video
  • Code
• Redux combineReducers & Thunk
  • Video
  • Code

The existing curriculum around Redux was put together in a very ad-hoc fashion. Having seen several classes of students struggle with it, when I finally got to rotate back onto the React curriculum, I decided to fix the gaps by rewriting how we deliver the material. I took Redux and structured it in a way where it was used to accomplish a few things:

• Summarize the student journey and start them on the journey to understanding Computer Science concepts. Show how many of the things they learned are the same concepts just applied to different domains and languages.
• As it’s one of the last topics taught, use it as a bridge to getting students to begin thinking about Software Design and Architectural Patterns. They are ready at this point to think bigger.
• Demystify Redux and remove the stigma surrounding it by showing that it is just a bunch of CS concepts combined with the freedom to architect your code as you like. It’s really just a test of your JavaScript and English skills.

Sadly, I left after iterating on this twice. While it’s much better and produced better results in understanding and application, there are still at least two other opportunities for improvement that I identified but never got to put into practice. I hope to revisit this and do a deeper explanation of the above (and more!) someday as a blog & video series for the general public.

Intro to Linux

• Video
• Slides

This was a fun optional lecture I delivered to our soon to be graduating students. It had gone through a few revisions. The very first time I delivered this, I dove deep into kernel architecture, system calls, processes, and the filesystem. Needless to say, I went way over my time limit and didn’t get to spend a lot of time on the practical fundamentals a junior dev would need.

After revising it with the advice of Evans Wang, I eventually turned this into a more fun presentation that was paired with a very fun hardware setup that I put together to demonstrate the power of Linux. You can see the exact list of hardware towards the end of the linked slides. I presented the first version of this at the second Flatiron School Teacher Summit and then a few more times to students.

There are many opportunities to improve it such as adding in a hands-on component, allowing students to connect and hack my demo devices, etc. If I ever return to instruction, I plan on taking this to the next level of fun.

Projects

I will possibly break out this section into different portfolio pieces. For the time being, these are two of the side projects aside from curriculum and lab creation that I created as part of my own initiatives to help the staff on other campuses.

• React Karaoke Challenge - Mock code challenge to help students practice writing React. There are later revisions to this not shown in the master branch.
• flatiron-manual-setup-validator - Script to check that the Manual Setup guide for Flatiron School was executed correctly. It is now out of date as my initiative to make this official was declined.

Lectures

This is a subset of the various lecture series I had to cover broken down by what we call Modules. I’ve taken out reviews that I did not do myself. This is also not curated as it’s just a random collection from various classes I had. Since curriculum also changed over time, I’ve merged some older videos into some of the lists so things may appear out of order as they are from different cohorts.

Module 1 💎 - Ruby, OOP, Databases, and ORMs

Module 2 💎 - MVC and Ruby on Rails

Module 3 🤠 - JavaScript

Missing a bunch of these. I did many of these lectures but mostly as a substitute so there’s no one place for me to look to to pull these together.

Module 4 ⚛︎ - React

Module 5 - Computer Science