Wk5 Makers Academy
“Nobody ever seems to remember life is a game we play”
~ Hello, Oasis
As a nod to all that I’ve learnt so far, below is a (Ruby) codified, (extremely) simplified version of life as I understand it.
In short; life is an array of experiences and a string of jokes. You learn by taking lessons from life and get lols by having a sense of humour :-)
Week one (proper) of Makers has seen me learning a bunch and shovelling a whole lot of skills into my experience array. While it shouldn’t be a surprise that I gained technical knowledge (except perhaps how much of it I feel I now possess), I’ve also enjoyed exploring some behavioural and philosophical questions.
TECHNICAL TOOLKIT
Context: up until a few weeks ago I didn’t do much more than use an iPad to watch TV, take notes and read about technology. Considering this, I am rather impressed at how, not only do the following applications / processes / words ring a bell for me, but that I have used and/or applied them in some way over the past week by coding the Boris-Bike system, and then an airport over the weekend(!)
SOFTWARE
Navigating the computer and getting it to do my bidding
- Command Line
- iTerm
Text editors for writing code
REPL (Read-Eval-Print Loop) interactive language shells for playing with code
Managing code files (version control)
SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT
Theory
- Object-Orientated Programming
Design
- Turning user stories into Domain Models
- Single Responsibility Principle
Practice
- Pair Programming
- Debugging, stack tracing
- Refactoring code for readability
Approach
- Test Driven Development (TDD)
- Behaviour Driven Development (BDD)
- Feature testing
- Unit testing
Programming Languages
- Ruby (object-orientated language)
- Rspec (domain specific language written in Ruby to test Ruby code)
- Markdown (plaintext formatting syntax to convert / format text to html)
Right now, I may not necessarily be a master of everything (or anything) listed, but still…
Upon entering any new trade, there’s a lot of ground work covered in the steep learning curve at the beginning. I imagine much of this sets the scene for deeper learning (and a steeper incline) in the coming weeks. From what I can see of the industry, the slope doesn’t ever really flatten out. However, if this week has been anything to go by, I can’t wait for the next 7 days/ weeks/ months/ years…
