12Feb 2019 by lewisbenf_l4g8es No Comments

WP Update Fail

Uncategorized
When I first set up my blog I went for Wordpress. At the time I was smack dab in the middle of the General Assembly WDI program so it was a little counter-intuitive. To me it was the most logical thing in the world. No, I wasn't building my resume site from scratch. I wasn't going to be spending a bunch of time on custom CSS. None of that mattered. I new that Wordpress was easy to set up, extensible, and easily maintainable*. Today I just got a reminder that the easily maintainable part isn't always true. I went to my site because I was about to include a link as part of a job application. Now what did I find but a very janky and odd looking version of…
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12Jan 2017 by lewisbenf_l4g8es No Comments

The Power of Point Five – Learn More About Your Numbers

Blog, General
I've been doing daily coding challenges on a couple of websites. It's been great to keep my skills fresh and find where I can improve my programming skills. Now the problem that I was working on yesterday was a simple one. I looked at it and thought to my self, "this is a little bit of simple math, I'll bang this out nice and quickly!". I write my code, give it a check, run the test case and at that point I think I'm golden. Then I run the submission tests, Pass, Pass, Pass, Fail..... wait, what just happened? I check my code and run the test case again, Pass. I run a custom test case, Pass. I run the submission tests, Pass, Pass, Pass, Fail. Ok, my first thought is…
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05Jan 2017 by lewisbenf_l4g8es No Comments
Why Tony the Tiger thinks you’re great, and doesn’t give a shit who’s the best

Why Tony the Tiger thinks you’re great, and doesn’t give a shit who’s the best

Blog, General
Tony the Tiger, mantiger, myth, legend. It's all about being a tiger, an animal. But it's not about being the best... [embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y6VHr1u5n_k[/embed] Here's the standard scenario. Kid isn't sure he can do something, Tony has faith in them and gets them to eat Frosted Flakes. This brings out the tiger in the kid and everyone is impressed, queue ending and "They're Grrreeeeat!". Now what's going on here?  There's been an intentional decision to focus on positive change and it's almost a perfect development of a story. They set the stage for an obstacle that needs to be overcome, the Frosted Flakes work as a agent of change, the subject undergoes a transformation and fulfills their goal, and this is reinforced with positive affirmation. What I want to highlight here is that…
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30Dec 2016 by lewisbenf_l4g8es No Comments

Movies for Programmers

Blog, General
When I started the Web Development Immersive program at General Assembly on of the first things that was mentioned was the Growth Mindset, and with that Searching for Bobby Fischer. I watched the movie almost immediately and there were so many hidden lessons I was totally blown away. Throughout the program a couple of other movies were mentioned, The Imitation Game was an excellent one, and I've been thinking about what movies would be relevant to programmers. Here's my current list, I'll update it as I find more movies to add: Searching for Bobby Fischer Great examples of Growth Mindset The Imitation Game Encryption, computers, logic, oh my! We Live in Public A bit of a dot com documentary, some very interesting lessons on user interaction. Good Will Hunting No company…
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14Dec 2016 by lewisbenf_l4g8es No Comments

A Beginners Guide to Blogging

General
I've blogged on and off for years, but it's mostly been off. For others that end up in the same position that I've been in here is some advice that I've received to help you start: Write - find any platform where you can quickly and easily capture your thoughts. This may be a notebook, twitter, a document, all that's important is that you start writing. Share - don't keep your thoughts to yourself! Put your content in a place that is unrestricted and can be found. This doesn't mean that you need to tell the world every time you make a post or an edit, just make your work available. Don't be Afraid! - do you want to improve? Cool! That means that you'll have faults, make mistakes and…
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16Nov 2016 by lewisbenf_l4g8es No Comments
Sweaters for Turtles

Sweaters for Turtles

Projects, Web Applications
Sweaters for Turtles, Nozama company, is the largest retailer of animal sweaters and they’ve been at the top of the industry for the past twenty years. However, with the advent of Etsy, they’ve noticed a steady decline of sales, as some users have switched to niche and craft sellers. As the leader in the market, Nozama has decided to create their own hub where crafters can sell their products through their platform and bring the whole market on board to their product. For the first version of their product they want a customer to be able to go to their site, browse through available items, add selected items to a shopping cart and purchase them using stripe payment processing. After an order has been placed the customer should be able…
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16Nov 2016 by lewisbenf_l4g8es No Comments
Tic-Tac-Yo

Tic-Tac-Yo

Projects, Web Applications
Presented by General Assembly, Neural Shunt Media, and Github Pages. Now This Is What I Call Tic-Tac-Toe 2016 is a compilation of your favorite tic-tac-toe games and features of 2016. Available now at: https://nlkassad.github.io/tic-tac-toe Now This Is What I Call Tic-Tac-Toe 2016 features code base from HTML, CSS, Sass, Javascript, jQuery, Ruby on Rails and code from Ben Lewis, General Assembly and referenced code notated on the bottom of this document. A limited edition of the wireframe for this release is available on Google Drive and it showcases all of the advanced functionality available in Google Draw Project planning was done in Trello, access is currently only available to members of the Now This Is What I Call Tic-Tac-Toe VIP fan club Additional Documentation: Original planning documentation Google duplicate of…
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16Nov 2016 by lewisbenf_l4g8es No Comments
Nacho Favorite

Nacho Favorite

Projects, Web Applications
Presented by General Assembly, Neural Shunt Media, and Github Pages.The client for the Nacho Favorite API based on the GA front-end template. This project is a demonstration of the power of tortilla chips and cheese, just like git-hub pages and heroku, rails and javascript, or handlebars and my mustache when these forces come together they are to be taken very seriously. [caption id="attachment_8" align="aligncenter" width="300"] Nacho Favorite Home Page[/caption]
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