Oh… Those AHA Moments!!
Bootcamp Day8
Paired with Prajval. We had to first finish off with the previous problem, for we were already lagging behind the schedule. It was time for our “fake business user” to make new demands, but here we were, still struggling to meet the older ones. By noon, almost every pair was done with it.
But the noon had an abstruse session lying in its folds. Sidu took over the podium to enlighten the new work folk in terms of jockeying their bank balances, in terms of understanding the real value of money, savings, and investments, and its importance with respect to other immaterial pleasures of life. We learnt to relate money to the hard work we do for the employer. Salary and savings are nothing but hard work done in the present in promise of monetary returns in the future. We learnt to not blindly follow the dream of being rich, rather, elucidate the exact definition of what BEING RICH means, and to what extent we need to work for it. We comprehended the debate between self satisfaction and rat race. It was indeed an AHA moment.
Followed by this, we had tech initiative session which was mainly designed to motivate us to be a part of various technical meetups, channels and groups. Evening brought us a new problem, but there wasn’t much time to brainstorm it.
Bootcamp Day9
Back to day 1. Code Game of Life again, in language of your choice (Java or Ruby), alone and the blessing was that completion is not mandatory. That’s not tough, we did it in 4 hours on the initial days. But the challenge again stands up. Be professional, follow TDD, do not give up on non-negotiable etiquettes of code. This is what scared the shit out of all of us. How tough can it be… To be professional?

Game of Life is a beautifully designed problem with simplest rules and most intimidating dependencies. Yes, we discovered it. Almost all of us had been coding for 3–4 years, been in the bootcamp for more than a week, yet, it indeed became an AHA moment. None of us could write a single module with hailing TDD and the etiquettes even in 4 hours. It was ironical. When we had no sense of being professional, like wild boars in a jungle, we could code the thing in 4 hours. Just the idea of following rules and being procedurally sophisticated brought us all over the knees and made us realise that we still have miles to go before being PROGRAMMERS.
We gave in the morning, the noon, the evening, we gave in the night too. We had long discussions over top down and bottom up approaches, we had long brainstorming sessions over the baby steps and the first specifications to be implemented. It was a tiring day, with no sign of progress. Being professional was easy when the problem was known, but a slight hint of real world complications and dependencies bent our backs.
It was midnight, I had written the specs and the logic for a finite matrix, with hard coded initial seed, but moving ahead was growing tougher. More stressing was the fact that it took us about 15 hours to do only a third of the problem.
But yeah, it did inspire us, to let down the flags again and be ready to learn more. We knew our place in the battlefield now, this petty simulation exposed our lack of training.
We need to learn more, think more, practice more, know more and experience more. Always. The process never ends. Being perfect is a holy grail. And game of life, is the mirror you need to assess your place.
