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AppAcademy W4D5

Well our crazy auth assessment is coming up, and I’m really having trouble finding the time to study for it properly since we didn’t have a proper weekend prior.  I am studying during my entire commute both ways, and then when I get home until I go to sleep.  There isn’t much more time I could squeeze out.  The practice assessment is 2 hours long, or rather its supposed to be.  So getting all the specs to pass at this point takes more like 3 hours, and there just isn’t enough time in the day to see this through.  

This whole shooting threat has really thrown a monkey wrench in the whole process.  I guess we’ll see what happens.

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AppAcademy W4D4 - Ugh..

Today we took our auth practice assessment.  For the real assessment passing will be something like 48 out of 55.  For the practice I got 15 out of 45.  The real scary thing is that was ABOVE average.  This one is gna be a doozy..

Other than that, the pieces of rails are really starting to come together, and now I could appreciate what it’s actually doing.

To summarize, this is hard, intense, fascinating, and fun.  I’m still loving it.  I’ll love it even more if I pass the auth assessment.

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AppAcademy W4D3 - Auth

We’ve gotten into the meat and potatoes now.  We’ve put together models, migrations, views, controllers, and tears!  There are so many moving parts, I’m really being challenged trying to manage all of them.  I feel like I am slowly putting the pieces together, but it is not easy.  In the last 3 days there has been a surge of information that is just so hard to hold.  The second you start to realize what one thing is, another 10 things are on your plate.  We have an assessment (our longest and hardest) on Wednesday, and only have one day off this weekend to study (since there was a shooting threat from a student in another cohort causing us to close for 2 days).  There is just such an unreasonable amount of knowledge to digest, but I suppose that is the nature of bootcamp!  Regardless, I am finding the material fascinating (except the html!).

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AppAcademy W4D2 - Rails..

Things are getting serious.  All these pieces we’ve been learning just smashed together into an epic web app monster in the form of a cat renting inter web mechanism.  My pairing partner today was very intelligent, and this helped me grasp the huge amount of colliding concepts.  I really enjoyed today and I’m glad that we will be continuing the same project with the same partner tomorrow.

I also am late to find out that Kevin Durant decided to join the Golden State Warriors.  Wow.  Cats.

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AppAcademy W4D1

Well first off I’m feeling great because I aced my third assessment.  After that, we moved onto rails controllers.  I was pretty confused by the lecture videos, but I felt patricks live lecture clarified a lot. We are getting deep into rails and actually using browsers now.  Onward!

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AppAcademy W3D5 - Solo Day

Today we had our first solo day, and while this may have been much welcomed 2 weeks ago, I felt myself really missing a pairing partner.  I’ve become so accustomed to talking out loud the second I come to a stand still.  If the enjoyment of pair programming wasn’t enough to make me appreciate it’s importance, then coding alone really did.

The project itself was quite exciting though.  We were building our own mini Active Record.  I find these projects where we build lite versions of projects to be very enlightening.  Learning how to use something is completely different from learning WHY to do something.  I have a great respect for they way they decide to give or not give us information.

At the end of the day, there was news of a threat made by one of the students in the other cohort saying he was going to shoot up the place.  This has worried a lot of people since he has made further threats since then.  Security will be needed at the office, and we now have to wait until Wednesday to go back.  Crazy stuff.  I’ll just keep coding at home till we go back..

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AppAcademy W3D4

Now I feel like we’re starting to get back to the fun stuff after that SQL excursion.  Today we built the active record associations portion of a polling app.  We focused on how all the relevant objects (questions, polls, users, answer choices etc..) relate to each other.  We spent our time figuring out has_one, has_many, belongs_to associations, and also spent time validating each object before it is put into the database. I had a great pairing partner too.  He had me laughing hard because at a certain point in our project he turned to me and asked the completely relevant question: “When was the last time you met someone named breakfast?” The funny part was that this was a truly pointed question that dictated our next move in the project. Then at the end of the day some students from another cohort came in to show off their capstone projects to employers, since this was their graduation.  It was quite remarkable to see the quality of projects made by people who were in my position just a few months ago.  It really seems like you just learn a ton in this place. Anyway, I’m enjoying the beginning of our journey into rails, and I look forward to solo project where we create our own active record.

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AppAcademy W3D3 - Rails

We’re on the rails, and I like it.  Today was like a breath of fresh air coming out of all the SQL crap and jumping into active record.  I like how we are tackling the functionality of rails bit by bit and not jumping right into everything at once.  I also vibed really well with my pairing partner, and that goes a long way.  We learned a lot together so I’d say mission accomplished.  Now I just need to make sure my SQL understanding is sharp enough to understand the abstraction of active record fully.

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AppAcademy W3D2 - SQL 2

More SQL.  I am having a strange relationship with this SQL stuff.  The logic of it is quite straight forward, but the syntax management (at least for me) is a challenge.  This is, however, the first time I’ve seen two languages work together to accomplish a bigger goal.  I always wondered what this looked like and now I am seeing it.  I only wish I could spend more time on the SQL stuff and gain a little more comfort before we totally abandon it for ActiveRecord.

Yesterday was rough, but I’m happy to be looking forward to returning every morning.  On that note, some of the guys here (guys being a gender non specific reference to anyone who may consider the word ‘guys’ a ‘micro-aggression’ ) are starting a coffee club.  So we will all chip in a few bucks and they are gna get some premium Joe for the kitchen.  Sounds like a brilliant idea.  Good vibes.

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AppAcademy W3D1 - SQL

And so it begins.  We move out of the cozy world of Ruby into the mean dank world of SQL.  No, it’s not that bad, it’s just a bit clunky.  I’m actually interested in the data manipulation and this whole thing expands my concept of how software works drastically.

I aced my second assessment, so I am happy!  Just 16,000 more weeks to go!

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AppAcademy W2D5  - Hash

Today was one of my favorite days.  We went through all the internal workings of a hash map and why it has instant lookup.  Even though this is some “under the hood” kinda stuff that we won’t really need to know in a functional environment, I found the idea fascinating that people had to actually figure this stuff out.  How to get something from O(n) to O(1), and actually figuring it out.

I am finding this abstract data structure stuff so interesting and I wish there was more of it.  

Assessment #2 is on Monday so I’ll be studying like a maniac....

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AppAcademy W2D4 - Big O

Today was one of the more math intensive days as we were looking at Big O notation which is basically a mathematical system of rating the time or space efficiency of an algorithm.

There was a lot of logarithm stuff, which I had to look up on wikipedia.

They said that we will not be paying much attention to algorithm efficiency for the rest of the course, but that this is a big deal on interviews.

We also had a practice assessment which I bombed, but at least I got higher than the class average.  Either way I will be studying my ass of this weekend.

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AppAcademy W2D3 - RSpec

Today we began diving into RSpec.  This is a testing library for ruby, with it’s own syntax.  Most of us found this pretty annoying because rather than delving into the logic of a problem, most of todays struggles were syntax related.  

As the day progressed, and the syntax because more familiar, it became more fun.  I also now really appreciate the process of TDD.

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AppAcademy W2D2 - Chess 2

Today was day 2 of our first big project.  My pairing partner and I nearly finished  creating a fully functional chess game.  I really loved this project.  It was the perfect way to learn about complex object oriented design.

We got off to a bit of a rocky start today since we disagreed about how much of the “demo” code to include in our own.  Basically the more of someone else's code we used, the more confused I got.  We were just supposed to use the demo code to color code the user interface, but we were pulling in some of the game logic as well. Eventually we agreed to start from scratch and this lead us down a good road.   I walked out with a brain full of knowledge and felt like I just took the SATs.

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AppAcademy W2D1 - Chess

Today was our first assessment.  I am thrilled that I got 31/31 tests to pass, but I did study my butt off over the weekend, so it wasn't easy.  I also need to be sure to keep that study ethic for every assessment. After the quiz we had a lecture on exceptions and then moved onto our first big project: chess.  This is our first 2 day project where we will actually have the same pairing partner for more than 1 day.  I enjoyed my partner on day 1 (aside from the fact that I DVR'd game 7 of the NBA finals, and he is by far the biggest basketball fan in the cohort so it is a constant worry that he's gna spoil the game). Anyway, I'm really happy about how the course is going, and I'm committed to staying on track.  Onward and upward!

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AppAcademy W1D5 - ADS

ADS - Abstract Data Structures

Today we worked on the creating a traversing a “tree” algorithm.  I find this whole introduction to data structures and algorithms to be fascinating.  This is the first really generic portion of the course.  In essence we are learning mathematical and organizational concepts that could be applied to any language, and any line of thinking really.

Still working on the pairing.  Today I had a great time with my partner.  We took the time to plan as much as we could before we moved forward.  The pen and paper are our friends!

Now its the weekend and I’m preparing for my first assessment.  I am glad we don’t have extra work because I am motivated to use all this time to ace the first assessment.  Fingers crossed!

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AppAcademy W1D4

Today was about debugging, pairing, and git.  My partner and I had to debug various versions of Sudoku, which we found to be quite fun.  This is a lot like detective work.  Before moving onto our second project of the day (Minesweeper), our lead instructed Tommy pulled us all over to the lecture area to reiterate how important the structure and quality of pairing is.  He told us it is by far the leading indicator of job placement after App Academy.  He then told us to ask each other how we could improve the second we got back to our seats.  That was a little awkward, but luckily I had a great partner and vibed well with him. 

With my next partner I am going to make a more serious effort to separate the “coding” portion of pairing (where we divide into the driver/navigator roles) and the planning phase.  I had been struggling with figuring out where the real collaboration happens if each partner takes turn sort of dictating the code.  I learned that this happens when you stop the timer and talk it out.  Before my partner and I started Minesweeper, we took this approach.  I see promise in this  direction and so I will try to implement that more with my new partner.

In addition to all that I am finding it nearly impossible to continue my work when I get home.  My brain just shuts off.  So now I am just pushing it to the next morning (as I am writing this at 8am on day 5).

Monday is our first assessment so I have a long weekend ahead of me.