Zachary Lopez

Project Links & Advice for Juniors

Here are links to a few of the projects I completed at Hack Reactor:

Q-Rad.io

Q-Radio is a rapid music discovery engine powered by machine learning. You listen to 30 second track, called RadSlices, and rate music. Quentin, our music Q-rator, then recommends new songs based on your likes and dislikes. This project integrates with Spotify and allows you to add to a special Spotify playlist so that you can enjoy the full songs.

Jaunt

Jaunt is a mobile responsive platform for storing and sharing data about walks through your city. The key idea is that a person can store their Jaunt and then a friend or other user can follow that exact journey. Not all features are built out, but you can play around and get a sense for what is there.

Junior Advice

Today, we meet with the juniors on our floor to give sage advice as they transition to becoming seniors. Here are my nuggets of wisdom:

Deploy, deploy, deploy

You will need your group projects published and ready to go for your resumes and the job hunt. The last thing you want to do is work out deployment while working on your thesis project.

Clean up/set up your online presence

Fix up your LinkedIn profiles, get updated. Do the same for Angel List. Lock down any social media that you don’t want to available.

Blog, blog, and more blog

This ties to the last bullet, but if you have very few blog posts by the time you hit hiring day, it won’t benefit you. Get publishing, even if it small helpful things. This demonstrates your care and commitment to the industry and the work.

Thesis project planning

Look ahead in the calendar. There will be a lot of other super useful lectures during this period. You should plan your project accordingly and know that it is not 4 full uninterrupted weeks.

Also, iterate quickly. Race to a MVP, then iterate from there. There will be a lot of pressure to have presentation ready materials and this will get you there.

Finally, work on the landing page or about page. This will be what the employers see and you don’t want to scramble at the last second to do this.

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