makersgonnmake-blog

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Meant to be?

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Week 1 (Official)

Last week marked week one of Makers Academy! 🎉

I have to say it was great. Due to the meet up & graduation last week, day 1 was definitely less scary having familiar faces there. The bulk of the day was spent learning about Makers, what they expect from us and what they expect us to gain from our experience, all about ‘learning to learn’ and so on. It was all very interesting and made a lot of sense. We did get a mini taste of pairing at the end of the day (woo!).

The main challenge for the week was to build a program to replicate London’s Boris Bikes. We had to to emulate all the docking stations, bikes and infrastructure. It was quite a challenge but it was great fun. Some days were definitely better than others. 

I was paired with ‘Captain Code’ for one of the days which meant I had to join another pair as we have an odd number of people in our cohort. I didn’t find it so easy pairing as a group of three, but I think that some of that may have been down to the way we were approaching pairing. Each using our own machines rather than concentrating on one and not sharing out the driver, navigator responsibilities. They day just felt like a downward spiral, I was struggling with git issues and understanding what we were doing and why in some situations. Most of my issue was with understanding instances. For that day I just couldn’t grasp it and my brain was feeling very much over-worked. By 3pm I was feeling burnt out and it just wasn’t my day. I had missed meditation, skipped it to replace with more coding. I realised later that this may have been part of my issue that day. I needed that break, to ‘hit the reset button’. 

Meditation really is so helpful. Its one of the reasons I chose this course over others - the fact that Makers really care for our well being. It’s not all go-go-go, it’s ok, good to take that break.

Luckily this was the only bad day of the week, well apart from Friday where I spent half of the day dealing with Open SSL issues.

At Makers we are taught TDD (Test Driven Development) using RSpec which has been a little difficult to master. The idea of writing tests before writing any code is a skill in itself, I’m trying to teach myself to have restraint but it definitely takes some practice. 

All in all a great first week, it was finished off with some well deserved beers with fellow Makers and graduates!

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Every day at Makers we do a stand-up where we discuss what we learnt, struggles and what we want to learn so in that light I want to reflect on that in each of my blog posts.

What I Learnt:

Meditation is important, don’t miss it. 

When pairing - Use one machine at a time. 

Debugging - Tightening the loop to find exactly where the problem exists.

Encapsulation - Separating behaviours into classes.

Struggles:

Back pain (I missed a yoga session)

Remembering to write tests first!

Open SSL

Understanding attr reader/writer & accessor

What I want to Learn:

Next week I really want to improve on my RSpec knowledge. I’ve been struggling to remember syntax and to know where to start writing tests.

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Week 3 & 4

Wow, well that went quick. 

Week 3 started out with a visit to Thoughworks to attend a seminar on Imposter Syndrome. It was brilliant and I even met a few ex Makers students. I felt empowered for all about 24 hours until I got stuck on our weekly challenge. It can just take one little knock sometimes to make me lose my confidence. I have to keep reminding myself that i’m a beginner and i’m here to learn! Throughout the course I will try to rise above these feelings of doubt and just keep on believin’! (As a Bieber fan may say.)

On the Wednesday my cohort organised a meet-up, those who weren’t working/ were in London came. It was good to meet them before the start so we could at least recognise familiar faces. It felt a little strange, we’d all chosen to do the same thing, leave our stable careers, we were at the very start of this rather fast and mildly terrifying journey. Before we know it we’ll be in May and finishing up!

Week 4 was quite a steady one, I had to make it to 5kyu on Codewars which was slightly challenging. It takes some power to get that circle all the way around but I managed it. It was also our first week trying out RSpec. We had to pair up so I met with Christos and we hacked away at it for a few hours. Making sure we understood it completely before going to the pub for a well deserved drink. 

On Friday I attended graduation for the November Cohort. The projects were all brilliant and it was scary to think that in 12 weeks time that would be us. We went with the graduates and juniors to the ‘after party’. I spoke to so many people about the course and everyone was so genuinely positive about their experience at Makers. It was really exciting to hear. But they all had the same advice for this weekend. -Don’t do anything, just chill. You won’t be doing that for a while.- Oh and ‘say goodbye to your friends and family’.

So today is Sunday. I start tomorrow, I’ve pre warned my boyfriend that he won’t be seeing much of me for a while and I think i’m all about ready. I’ll try to keep this blog updated as much as possible. If you’ve made it to the end of this post, well done. See you next week. 

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Week 2

The main challenge of the week was to complete a Ruby tutorial. I was intrigued by Josh Cheek’s Ruby Kickstart so decided to go with that. But boy, by Tuesday afternoon I had only just got through the first session and even that was a struggle. This was also the week I was moving to London so I had much to do! I made an executive decision to do Zed Shaw’s Learn Ruby The Hard Way instead and it seemed to be completely different to Kickstart, a little too easy at some points but I liked Zed’s way of teaching. (I’m going to back to Kickstart when I get some time as I hate the feeling of leaving it.)

But by Friday I had finished LRTHW and packed up my life! Good timing as it was moving day. We moved down to London yesterday, car full to the brim but it was very successful indeed! Now looking forward to getting used to life in ‘The Big Smoke’. The weekend was spent with a little of this and of course some Codewars (which was part two of the weekly challenges). Luckily I was already past 7 kyu so just did some Kata to solidify my knowledge/ confidence in a few areas. 

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It’s time...

The time has finally arrived, at the beginning of this week I was feeling rather nervous about starting the Makers Academy Pre-course, before I talk about that let me explain how I got here:

About exactly one year ago, I was feeling pretty fed up. I’d been in my job for three years then and while the time I’d spent working there had been good. I felt like I needed more, more excitement! I’ve always enjoyed coding- the parts i’ve dabbled in for work and uni. So I decided to look into it some more, and ended up attending one of Liverpool Girl Geeks ‘Get your head around code’ sessions. It was just an intro into the languages of the web but it was so enjoyable. And after speaking to the teacher, Alex who decided to take a course in computer science after having already gone to university to do a completely different subject, and was now bossing it. I was inspired!

Cut to a few weeks later, I was looking for suitable courses and came across quite a lot of recommendations for Makers Academy. My first reaction to it was, “Wow, too expensive. I could never afford that” but the more I read into it the more it really sounded impressive. It’s a coding bootcamp that really cares about its students wellbeing and committed to bridging the gender gap in technology. But become a junior developer in 4 months?! We’ll see! So after 3 months of living with my boyfriend in our first flat I asked him if he’d join me on a move to London. Today marks roughly a year since then and one week until we move to London! Also it was my last day in work, oh and I finished the challenge for Week 1 of the pre-course. BIG day!

So the objective of this week was to get to grips with command line and Git, luckily I’d done some studying up on these before the course started. (I was just far too eager to get going) So that helped me out for this week. I needed that help to get through the work after the long work days. 

The best part of the week was the challenge. Command Line Murder Mystery! It really was a bit of a challenge but it was an exciting one. Who knew they really can combine fun & learning?! So, what is it I hear you ask... WHO DUN IT?! - Sorry I can’t say. Go solve it for yourself...