Half way there…

Irene Hakes
Sep 6, 2018 · 2 min read

Whoa. What a 6 weeks it has been! I am currently sitting in my living room enjoying our review week having just completed Junior phase of the Grace Hopper program. It is astonishing to me that those 6 weeks are over but also that ONLY 6 weeks have passed. To give you some context, here is what we accomplished in those 6 weeks:

  • Linked Lists, Sorting Methods & Binary Search Trees
  • HTML, CSS & the DOM
  • Node & Express
  • SQL, Sequelize & PostgreSQL
  • React, Redux & React-Redux

All of this culminated in out Senior Enrichment Project, which utilized all of these concepts in order to create a campus directory. 6 weeks ago I did not know what most of these things were and now I am sitting here blogging about them. To say that blows my mind is an understatement.

Going into the Senior Enrichment Project, I was incredibly nervous. Sure, I was following along in class and was able to complete the workshops, but would I really be able to draw from what I learned in class and create something from scratch? The 3 days we were given to complete the project were some of the most rewarding days I have had in my life. Testing out the skills I had learned of course started off with some hiccups ( spending way too long debugging my code when the error turned out to be just a typo, forgetting to start the server and wondering why my code no longer worked that had been working 10 minutes ago!), but as the pieces started to fall together and things started working, I was hooked! It was such a gratifying feeling to have created something on my own.

I cannot wait to begin Senior phase next week. The following 6 weeks will be much more hands on with us tackling 3 projects in that time frame. I will also be running a tech talk on a topic of my choosing. So stay tuned!

But for now, during the rest of review week, I will be brushing up on my algorithms, working on my website, and researching potential topics for my tech talk. And catching up on some Netflix…of course!

    Irene Hakes

    Written by

    Irene is a software engineer based out of New York City.