More Pairing and RSpec
Day three was very similar to day two, the only difference being that we had a new pairing partner for the day and we had a workshop and talk scheduled for the day.
After a great first day of pairing, I felt ready and confident for the day and keen to get working with my new partner. As we were working with different pairs, we were at different stages in the weekly challenge. We weren’t using Git Pong (I don’t know why we weren’t) so we had setup one github repo, which each partner would pull and push to. The idea was to work from the partner who was the furthest behind, this way the person who was further ahead can go over the steps again and help explain concepts to the other partner, who may not have got that far. This became confusing as I had to clone a new repo, even though I already had one locally, from a different github repo, so to make things a little easier and simpler, I created a new folder, called Day_3, which would hold the boris-bike repo for the third day. This, I know, is inefficient and didn’t seem right, however after being told to steer clear of git pong for now, we pushed on with the challenge and tried not to get hung up with git, and instead push on with RSpec.
More RSpec
During our afternoon standup, a common theme that arose was RSpec, and again to do with the syntax and how things work. Whilst I listed it as a struggle, I did actually learn something, quite small and simple, but I still learnt something! I now know that when describing a class in RSpec, you have to use ‘subject.method’ to call the method from the class, as opposed to just calling the method. Me and my pair got stuck on this during the morning workshop for a while and one simple word made our tests go from red to green, which felt great! It was something small to learn, but it highlighted the fact that learning through doing and making mistakes actually worked. For the rest of the day I understood what I had learned and actually ended up using it in the tests for the Boris Bikes challenge.
I also realised after only 2 days, I had so much more knowledge, I knew more about Ruby, RSpec, the command line, I learnt new practices including Extreme Programming, I learnt what SRP means and understood it and so much more. Most of the things I was learning made sense and it felt great that I was making progress after a couple of days.
Obviously I have a long way to go, and there were numerous times that I was (and will still be) confused, stuck and lost. However, if I could end the day having learnt something, or having made sense of something I didn’t understand, I knew that I was one (very small) step closer to being a junior developer. (I hope).
