My First Week at Launch Academy

One week down of an immersive web bootcamp, nine to go

…. phew.

I’ll say it again. Phewphewphew.

This past week has been an exhilarating rush. New names, new faces, new places and new… programming stuff. Lots of it.

I’ll try to elaborate, but I… brain dead ….. at the moment.

You have to understand where I’m coming from: at least 50 times this week I felt like I knew nothing, and and at least as many times I’ve been amazed to see how much I actually have learned in such a short time.

Through lectures/challenges/presentations (which is not a file path, even though my eyes are thinking that way) we learned the beginnings of Sinatra, how HTTP works, some HTML, ERB, CSS, as well as a general review of Ruby, as well as how to make dynamic web pages using all these things by creating servers on our computer and running them on a local host, as well as a crash course on how the internet actually works (which, to be honest, I really had no idea).

I wanted to detail a couple of highs/lows/goals, etc. here because things are so hectic I’m sure I will not be able to remember them in even a few days:

My biggest challenge this week was probably with the kickball-site problem. I had an error that I couldn’t get past for about two days (which felt like about six, with the way time is moving). Finally Friday morning a staff member helped me figure it out…. it was an error in my erb-embedded Ruby code…

My biggest triumph this week came pretty late, on Thursday afternoon. I felt like I had been getting pummeled all week with assignments and not really understanding/being able to to successfully complete anything. The pace felt a lot faster than our pre-work and topics started coming at us in rapid succession. At times (especially during the first day or two) I felt like I had maybe made a huge mistake.

Luckily my cohort are all incredibly nice, smart, driven and super generous with explaining things (if any of you are reading this please find me — I need help with something). They have been there time and time (and time) again to bail me out when I was staring at the same error message for too long. And when they couldn’t help, I posted a question and someone from the staff swooped in to save the day.

But on Thursday things started to coalesce a bit more in my brain. I began to understand some big level concepts… or at least, the stuff I was staring at on my screen seemed a bit less foreign to me. I began to be able to make specific changes rather than just blindly trying things and hoping they worked out.

Specifically this happened on a news aggregator site I was working on, that takes submissions and posts them to the site…. I began to see what each piece of the puzzle was doing and where it fit in, which, literally, made me light-headed with excitement.

So I’m looking forward to more of those moments of revelation (and trying to forget the moments of confusion in between).

Its bizarre because the work has been so intense that a couple people have mentioned how it feels like we have all been here a lot longer than we actually have. It seems like it’s been a couple months, and it’s hard to imagine we have nine more weeks in front of us.

My goal for next week will be to really clamp down on my work protocol and be more methodical about how I approach every problem, breaking it down into pieces and tackling each tiny bite at a time before worrying about the next step.

One of the staff here mentioned that’s the way she works, and I think it’s a good idea. I’ve noticed I lost a lot of time on past problems trying to tackle too many things at once. So… that’s my goal.

I literally cannot remember the last time I’ve been this productive or learned so many little things in the space of such a short time. Even if I get nothing more out of the program other than just finishing, I’m really glad I decided to do it. Looking forward to the next few weeks…..