Woke up around 11am this morning – very late, but the nice thing about Hacker School is that nobody gets upset if you don’t come in during the right hours. We have 24hr access to the space, so it’s totally fine to show up late and stay late. Or show up late and leave early. It’s entirely self-directed. I had been getting a sore throat over the last few days and sleeping in seemed to really help with that, so I think in the long run it was a good decision.

Took the train in (bought some fruit snacks off a street vendor and got a Chipotle burrito) and noodled around with React for a few hours. Ran in to a lot of weird problems, but there’s not much documentation on this. I’d love to find a real React expert and pair program with them for just a moment, or have them review my code. Maybe I’ll put out a call on the internet next week. It’s just going really slowly because I don’t feel like I have a good grip on the libarary, and there aren’t any people at the school who know anything about it. Monday, I’ll talk to some of them about it anyway.

Thursdays are presentation day at Hacker School, and quite a few people got up and gave short (strictly limited to two minute) presentations. I went last and gave my talk on noobs: how online communities welcome new users. It was apparently a rare format (not many people have talked about not-code during a presentation), but I actually plan on giving a non-technical talk each Thursday just to mix things up, if I can find enough topics. (Maybe a talk on why Terminal_ fell apart?)

Some people were leaving to go to a bar and play Cards Against Humanity, but that’s actually not a game I particularly enjoy (once the shock value has worn off, it’s just offensive Apples to Apples). I was going to see if anyone was interested in playing a game that I built, “Code and Cred”, but everyone seemed to be super in  to CaH, so I went back to work on Budgeted.

StarCraft 2’s World Championship Series is this weekend, and I watched a lot of that at the school before getting on the train and heading back. I figured that I would just be watching it in my hotel room, and Ian and Michael were at the school and I hung out with them for a while. The A took a long time to arrive, and there were a lot of maintenence crews on the line. They would stand inches from the train as we hurtled by them. I could feel the heat from the incandescent lamps that they hung on my face as we went by them.

Got back, browsed Reddit, mapped out the fact that I have to wake up in 3.5 hours, and wrote this blog post. Goodnight, and I’m off to WI tomorrow to start Graduation ceremonies!

From New York City,

–Erty