Ignition(Pre-work) Reflection

Launch Academy is an immersive developer program that begins with a couple months of pre-work called ignition before face to face learning. Technologies and concepts that were covered included JQuery, Javascript, html, css, git, ruby, web design fundamentals, productivity, and learning. All of these technologies/concepts I had some familiarity with prior to ignition except for JQuery. I felt that I learned the most when I was simply asked to build something or figure out a coding challenge. Maybe it was due to my personal learning style, but I found the exercises with videos more frustrating because the videos were slower than reading a section would be and it was harder to go back and look at anything you missed and write stuff down. My favorite resource was Chris Pine’s “Learn to Program.” as it was seriously well developed. The book offers the reader an introduction to the ruby programing language. Pine used a methodology similar to agile web development in his development of the book by creating many iterations after the book was released, taking into account user feedback until he created a book humorous and entertaining book that is easy for the laymen to understand and includes coding exercised that allow for readers to apply the principles and build something.

I also enjoyed the book Practical Object Oriented Programing it was a bit dense for someone without tons of experience but I have the background of having taken CS 101(Object Oriented Programming I)at Umass Dartmouth and I felt that this book got at the real meat of Object Oriented Programming theory much more than my Java textbook “Java, Java, Java” did for CS 101. While the Java textbook told me “Everything is an object” without really explaining what that meant for designing applications Sandi explained how to design from an Object Oriented perspective, simplifying classes so that each class has its own function and is as independent as possible.

Now that I’m finished with all of the pre-program requirements I’m working through the extra credit and I’m excited to start the face-to-face program next week!