Beginning of a Coding Bootcamp

Day 1 of Flatiron School:

Anxious. Terrifying. Exciting. Nervous. Many feels thinking how I will mentally prepare for this. Imposter syndrome. What am I doing? Will I be able to get through this? This is already so much!

End of 1st week:

Wow. So. Much. Information. So little time………..

I would feel that I would mostly freak out whenever I get a bug that I cannot solve within 5 or 10 minutes. I would feel stupid whenever I would ask my SEC (Software Engineering Coach) about a recent bug that pops up. I would look at the error but I wouldn’t know what to do with that error. Every time I looked it up through Stack Overflow, I would be overwhelmed with answers that use syntax way out of our current learning field scope. Stack Overflow is good for seeing different ways of solving the errors using many useful methods and gems, but using what we learned so far seemed more beneficial to establish that foundation of knowing the ins and outs of a method. For instance, .reverse method is easy enough to reverse a string, but knowing how to do it manually helps understand the way it works too if we didn’t have that ‘shortcut’ method.

End of 2nd week:

I’m getting it, but I’m also not getting it. I’m coming up with coding puns.

I had to retake the coding challenge because I felt pretty slow when things that didn’t come to me compared to others. I felt behind because I was not sure about myself with iteration and accessing nested hashes and arrays. It was worrisome for me to have to balance catching up on ORM/ActiveRecord labs, and retaking the coding challenge.

End of 3rd week:

Beginning of the week started with my retake of the coding challenge. Learning ORM/ActiveRecord actually somehow helped understand back to the code challenge since it was working with a light database AKA “@@all = []” class array where all instantiated objects were getting pushed to @@all array. Trying to access data for ActiveRecord helped me with iteration and data accessing code challenge.

######Code Challenge Way######
@@all = []

def initialize(name)

    @name = name
    @@all << self

end

def self.all
   @@all

end

#Iterating
self.all.each{|n|
   n.name #lists all names

}

#####Active Record Way######

create_table :pets do |p|
   p.string :name

   p.integer :age
   p.string :breed
end

#Reading from the migrated database
#Iterating
   pets.all.each {|p|

    p.name #lists all names
}

This structure really helped me process the planning stage for the project because of working on the code challenge practices, using the READMEs as an outline, and working with the ActiveRecord labs.

Jumping into project time. We worked on a CLI (Command Line Interface) Application as a partner project. My paired partner, Christopher, and I’s project was a lyric builder where we used the lyric.ovh API to have the user build their own set up lyrics based on lines of their favorite songs lyrics. This project really put in the test of everything we’ve learned in the past 3 weeks, from Object-oriented programming, to iterating nested hashes, and ActiveRecord.

This was a learning experience of working a big program. So much ups and downs happening with this project that could be extended for other future blog posts. From the struggles of working with git and branches, refactoring, and object oriented programming vs. functional programming, which one would be appropriate.

On to continuing weeks for this bootcamp. Even though it is nerve-wracking and always on my toes on what’s to come, my mind is always set to “I can’t wait to apply this knowledge to build some cool stuff in the future!”