Code School – Postmortem – Part II

Continued from Part I

The weekend bootcamp came and went pretty quickly. The basics of web development (AKA learning what happens when you click on a link in a browser besides “a page loads”) were covered, websites were launched and before you know it the weekend was over. It was enough.

After marinating on the thought for a little while I decided it was time. I loaded up the application page in my browser and… the application date had passed.

Damn.

On a whim I shot off an email checking to see if anyone had dropped out and if I still had a shot for the summer session. As luck would have it, fortune favors the mildly inquisitive. A few days later I had an interview and several days after that I had a curriculum: get comfortable with HTML and CSS because on day one you’ll be expected to work with it (the book we were assigned was by Jon Duckett and has the pleasure of being both informative and beautifully designed). So far so good, though, as it turns out once you apply for a 9-5 programming bootcamp you have to actually quit your job. In the interests of full disclosure I left a position in administrative assisting… somewhat non-ironically a field ripe for automation.

Two weeks went by quickly, but time slowed slightly for my non-deathbed conversion to OSX and then quickly sped up again.

Week One:

Day one is difficult to separate from all of week one without the aid of a spatula, but I vaguely remember introducing myself to a lot of unfamiliar faces who I count as friends today. The subject was Ruby, Git, and environment setup for anyone who hadn’t quite acclimated to their knew development home on the command line (hint: me!). The days were structured, lectures, assignments, readings and of course pairs for paired programming. I don’t recall the first few days being mind blowing, but they were demanding. A little later we found our Everest: Recursion. Most of us slammed our brains against the concept of implementing recursion and just before we grasped it we were moving on to the next thing.

I recall at the end of the week taking stock of myself. I was exhausted. 10 hour days and all of them spent learning something new. Everyday involved constructing context just to feel comfortable enough to crawl ahead another inch. I’d been out of practice educating myself for some time now. I wasn’t sure I could do it. Maybe I just wasn’t cut out for this. I could quit the following week and only lose the deposit… I could probably get my job back. I’d give it one more week.

Week Two:

More Ruby, the command line doesn’t feel alien, programs are starting to do what I want them to. I think i’ll stick it out. Finding out that I wasn’t the only one completely off balance was a great comfort and paired programming really helped drive home that I was among good people to learn with.

Week Three:

Javascript, the language of web ubiquity and semicolons, but mostly semicolons. We started by way of jQuery. The pace had been set by now to the point that no one seemed particularly phased by the complete shift in programming language. The ability to make things fly across the screen was a welcome change from ASCII graphics on the command line. A good week for small constructive victories.

Week Four:

You can test Javascript? Weird.

Read the rest:

Read Part I Here

Part III: Group Projects, Agile Development, and Employer tours.

Sleep Hygiene

Or lack thereof…

We were assigned 10 hours of sleep before our first exam and that is the last time I managed more than 8 hours of sleep in this program.

I need a better nights rest for memory and retention, mood, and keeping my brain generally spongy, pliable and absorbent. So far just going to bed at the right time has failed.

http://sleepyti.me/ is something i’ve been experimenting with along with general good sleep hygiene:

Don’t sleep in the same place you work
Get enough water during the day
Meditate before bed
Exercise everyday (okay, this one needs some work)
Less sugar and caffeine

I can’t seem to eliminate my computer time right before bed and when I do manage it my mind is filled with code (pseudo code really… if I dreamt in syntax I might be a bit better at it by now).

I almost forgot to close those parentheses just now.

Until then: sudo sleep

Well underway – Week 3

Three weeks in and already onto our second programming language (3 really, if you count a cursory introduction into Javascript). I can already see how jQuery will be useful and that I don’t want to start any sentences with it on account of that lower case ‘j’.

Its a relatively satisfying change of pace to see functioning code make immediate changes in a browser window as opposed to the command line for the past two weeks in Ruby. Although we’re accomplishing similar tasks jQuery is less abstracted from the end user… who I sympathize with having been one three weeks ago and by all accounts also still being one today.

Three weeks means our third textbook as well and Learning jQuery 3rd Edition is proving a little more dense and less elegant than Eloquent Ruby. Javascript and jQuery are also more dense and a little less elegant than Ruby, so it feels at little consistent at least.