Week 3 + Week 4
@makersacademy
Week 3 started with a quite big project called Boris Bikes which you can find it here. Although I started working on it alone, I ended up pairing with Nico and Rob following their approach with doubles. Powerful stuff going on there, and from what I can tell, when powerful stuff are happenning I feel more and more lost. I always think it’s good to have an idea what’s going on under the hood, so I wasn’t entirely sure of this kind of approach. After reading this I went carefully, step by step, with doubles, but have in my mind to not to overuse them and trying always to follow behaviour driven development. The week ended with another project called Architect test and as you can see from the feedback I FAILed to pass the test. Actually, the code for that task was already there but it was missing its test. This is what happens when you’re not following 100% the TDD methodology.
Week 4 and more OOP.
Although I have to admit that the image above is cool, the movie, however, was not. But that’s another story. Our task for the week was to write the code for the game of Battleships and not to worry about how it’s connected with the server so you can play with it. I’ve got to say that after 3 days of 4-group-pair programming (me and other classmates found that really hard) we managed to have the interaction of shooting on empty coordinates(water) and on actual ships. However, for some reason, I felt that this week was the most unproductive week since the beginning. Maybe the fact that I was starring at the screen for, literally, hours, without writing a line of code, without even knowing where to start. Actually, Enrique had a good point when he told me that I suffer from the writer’s block! Ha! He was right. So, from now on, here’s what I’m gonna do:
Grab a pen and a piece of paper and start writing-drawing-pointing random things, in short term, describing what your application-problem is all about and what approach you are going to take. Essentially, design what you want to build.
Something worth mentioning is, the fact that our last days were starting with a small presentation of us on the projector, implementing methods from the Ruby documentation explaining what they do and where they would be useful. Alex’s idea. Kudos Alex!
On Thursday, after Stevie Buckley’s talk at Makers, we were invited to the Hacker London meetup which was placed 5 minutes away from the academy. Really nice suggestion of him cause the talks were amazing. Personally, I’ve been in a lot of meetups in the past and I wasn’t sure if I wanted to go. But, when Citymapper’s founder gives a talk, you shouldn’t miss it. He went quickly through a demo of how the app looked like at the beginning, what essentially they were trying to solve and how they expanded to NY City, Paris and Berlin. Some really good tips as well, about startups mainly, which I liked this one the most:
Another great talk was from Dan Crow CTO @songkick. Previously worked on Google, Apple, Unicru…you name it. What a great opportunity to hear these people talking about how they approach every single problem in order to deliver their products.
Amazing stuff that you can find only, and I strongly believe that, in London.
I am going to end this post refering to the cover image. Today, is the first day of the 2-day hackathon at Makers. Some really interesting ideas, some others not, but that’s not the case. You will still learn a lot if you commit yourself into a 2-day non-stop coding, especially when you’re going to work with experienced developers. The question, though, is the following:
Is it alright to go on burnout mode from Week 4? Can we stand 7 days in a row with a tough week coming up of solving japanese games, aka sudoku, getting to know web application frameworks, aka sinatra, http-requests aka how the web works and on top of all that, learning of course, more Ruby..??
The answer, is yes.
At the end, it’s all about pizza and beer. Bring it on then.
