Iron Yard — Week 2

While week one felt a little bit about going away to summer camp, week two is where a little bit of fatigue settled in. It’s going to be a long burn, and I can’t wait to get to the end and reflect on how far this process has taken me and my classmates.

Each day except for Friday consists of lectures in the morning and lab (exercises) in the afternoon/evening. On Fridays, we have lab all day.

In week one, we were introduced to all the starter stuff for front end development: HTML, CSS, Sublime/Atom, zshell, git, and GitHub.

This week, we started with Sass to help speed up our CSS development process. We also dived a little deeper into git and GitHub. With every exercise, we use git. So a foundation of version control is becoming a natural process for us.

The Iron Yard does a real good job. It’s not just about head-down coding. They make a point to foster a sense of community and create activities that don’t involve a keyboard. This week, we had sessions about personal brand building, design inspiration, and of course there was Friday Iron Pints.

On Wednesday and Thursday, we formally started to spool up on JavaScript. We’ve covered the foundations of the language — the five primitive data types (number, string, boolean, null, undefined). We’ve also started into the whole business of “everything else in JavaScript is an object.” We’ve touched on the object prototype, and started to dwell a bit on the array prototype, with lots of exercises on loops, conditionals, and functions.

It’s moving pretty darn fast (and I’m glad for that). Before this week, I was under the impression that map/reduce/filter are programming concepts that are intermediate level. Not here. We learned about the forEach loop and an hour later, we embarked on our Thursday night homework that included exercises with map, reduce, and filter.

The train has left the station…