React for Beginners at Northwest Chicago JavaScript

This was a super fast intro to many features of React. A note to remember, React is a library whereas Angular is a framework. React is a smaller and quicker to pick up and use. Angular is much more intense with more features and information. The presentation showed how to use React components to render items in the browser. You can set items to render with both state and stateless ways as well as choose how the items will be manipulated.

Java Sneak Peek hosted by CJUG & GOTO nights with Brian Goetz/Oracle

This was a great talk from Brian Goetz/Oracle about what is up and coming in Java. The changes he spoke about were local variable inference, data classes, pattern matching, and safer serialization. None of the changes are guaranteed, but all ideas that his team is working on for the future.

He also spoke about Java not being a trendsetter, but more of a stable language. The folks at Oracle prefer to let other languages test features first and run them successfully for a while before Java will implement new ideas.

Write Speak Code Workshop "Own Your Expertise"

I attended the Write Speak Code "Own Your Expertise" Workshop this weekend and wow it was AMAZING! So many awesome women, everyone was super supportive and networking came easy with this group. I never really thought of myself as a writer, so I had passed this group up a few times. But when I attended, I found out it was so much more. Own your expertise was all about finding out what you are good at, what knowledge you have and how you can share it with others.

Of course the three ways to share your knowledge with others are to write, speak and code about it. But I never realized how you could take each one of these paths and aim it toward your own skills. One of the questions that really stood out to me was "What are the five things you talk about the most with others?" and to take those things among other skills to share.


This workshop was all about taking what skills you have or what interests you and using that to inspire you to code or help with an open source project, present at a conference or workshop, or write blogs and articles to spread the knowledge. This was emphasized due to the lack of women speakers and women's presence in general in so many events as leaders in tech. There were countless exercises and tons of support at this meetup, a definite one not to miss in the future!

Coding Bat Progress

I have finally finished 5 sections on Coding Bat. I do these intermittently as I have small bits of extra time in between other projects.

I totally had planned to have these finished by now, but as you get to the end of each set of problems there is a lot of logic involved. I found out I do better when I work on these on my day off in the morning while my brain is fresh. LOL. So, I will continue to work on these as I can and hope to have them finished in the near future.

They are excellent practice and I highly recommend Coding Bat.

http://codingbat.com/java