Weeknotes - 01 Makers PreCourse

Makers Lift Off!

This was a momentous week, wherein I began the PreCourse for Makers¹. 🎉 The cohort & coaches got acquainted on Slack, and I found out that climbing is a Big Thing.

I had a video chat about the process and my options as a Fellow with Careers Manager at Makers, Lauren. 👋

Course Content & Challenge

This week was largely about getting the environment set up, plus getting familiar with a broad range of Command Line and Git commands. A murder mystery² - solved in the command line - reinforced frequently used commands that will be useful in the coming weeks (and ...life). It felt as if I whizzed through the content as it wasn't unfamiliar, and I really enjoyed the practise of the challenge. By Thursday I'd dived into next weeks' Ruby mastery syllabus.

Debugging

Problem solving is a Bigger Thing than climbing, so I made some notes on the debugging process³,

• Extract info from the error message 🐝
• Find the first wrong line 🔍
• Get visibility of the issue 👁️
• Fix the bug when the problem is understood ✔️

CityJS Conference

I was happy to be given a ticket via codebar⁴ to the CityJS conf⁵ in London! I really enjoyed the variety and quality of the talks. A lot went over my head; I've probably written a total of 4 lines in JS to date... but, it wasn't a barrier to many of the concepts/presentations.

Speaker highlights

• I enjoyed Chris Heilmann's⁶ talk, he mentioned the variety of considerations and trade-offs to consider when seeking accessibility.
• Shrishtika Neelakantam's⁷ description of the evolution of web services was enjoyable, informative and, beautiful.
• I want to explore getting the right syntactic sugar balance following Maya Shavin's⁸ talk.

Misc.

• Shout out to Dan Barrett⁹, my weeknotes inspo 🙌
• Spending a whole day viewing talks left me in a lot of pain. I'd love to get some tips from anyone else who suffers physical postural pain? My two cents: always have pain-killers and sunglasses
• I'm concerned about the impact of conference freebies on the environment...
• Giving unsolicited editorial feedback is very on brand but does it make me seem tOo InTeNsE?

Weeknotes Notes

_{This post was edited to with footnote support Jun 2019}

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1. Makers | website ↩

2. Mary Rose Cook, How to debug your code: wring the error message, tighten the loop and get visibility ↩

3. Noah Veltman, The Command Line Murders | GitHub | website ↩

4. codebar | website ↩

5. CityJS Conference | website ↩

6. Chris Heilmann, <feTurbulence> && !important | @codepo8 ↩

7. Srushtika Neelakantam, The current state of the data sharing economy | @shrushtika ↩

8. Maya Shavin, Syntactic sugar - Diabetes alert | @MayaShavin ↩

9. Dan Barrett | @dasbarrett ↩