It’s funny. You never hear the word “ulterior” unless it’s collocated (associated) with “motives”. I guess it means “hidden”, “not obvious” or even “devious”? You hear a lot about exterior and interior, but how “ulterior” fits in is not entirely clear.

Anyway, you may have heard the expression, “There’s no such thing as a free lunch.” Regardless of the fact that this was coined somewhere around 1930 when indeed, free lunches were hard to come by, in the tech community in Seattle you might change it to “There’s no such thing as a free beer.” But actually, this week, I have indeed enjoyed both free beer and a free lunch. Oh, and a free JavaScript tutorial from an actual human being!

On Monday, I joined the “Learn JavaScript the Right Way” meetup in Ballard to go over homework assignments. One highlight was drinking hot chocolate in a tea shop. Another highlight was breaking Code Academy via an infinite loop in one of their JavaScript exercises. Surprising, because I’m sure I’m not the first person to write an infinite loop on Code Academy. A further highlight was the helpful spirit and community feel of the meetup. We had one “expert” who happily answered all our silly (and not so silly) questions. We shared resources, and I’m really looking forward to next week!

On Tuesday, it was South Lake Union for Code Fellows’ open house. You’ve no doubt heard of these coding “bootcamps” and have strong opinions about them. Let’s skip that. I mostly wanted to see what the place was like, how it compared to another for-profit school (that may or may not contain the letters “ITT” in the name), and get the aforementioned free beer. Check, check, and check. Way more legit than the unnamed school (I used to work there so I guess I’d know), and totally relevant to Seattle’s job market. Wow, I’m kind of talking myself into applying as I write this. If anyone would like to “sponsor” me, I can promise you free access to my blog posts for life.

On Wednesday, it was to “Impact HUB” (not to be confused with The Hub at UW), located on the block in Seattle that receive more 911 reports than any other single street. Awesome. Despite subtly closed blinds and muffled homeless yelling across the street, we enjoyed an 8+ hour workshop on using PhoneGap, Apigee, and Codiqa to create mobile apps using HTML, CSS, and jQuery (and jQuery mobile). And that’s where the free lunch comes in. I got much more comfortable with the command line, learned more about jQuery mobile (although I’m not sure how much of a “thing” it really is), and am psyched to see Worry Wart in an app store near you soon.

So I’m sorry to say that I am very cynical and fully expected a “pitch” at both Tuesday’s and Wednesday’s events. I even had my cynical face on, which I’m making at this very moment. Since I don’t want to scare you away, I’ll just pretend that this Mac doesn’t have a camera built in right now. Luckily, I was proven wrong, and on top of free beer and a free lunch, I met some cool people and learned some cool things. And I’ll stop there because based on that last sentence, I’m running out of adjectives.