Pre-Course Week 3

As week 3 ends I enter into the last week of the pre-course at Makers Academy. It’s been quite a quick four weeks and wouldn’t have thought things would have gone as fast as they have. I’m settled in my new flat and everything seems to be moving a lot faster than I thought, but that’s what makes it so exciting!

I think I explained the gist of week 3 in my previous post, but it was basically just a step-by-step guide through building a student directory app, using the command line. The exercises were well balanced, some being quite challenging and others quite straightforward but the fact it took you through a total process from start to finish is probably why I found it to be the best week yet. I was able to understand the use of hashes and arrays in a real-world application, as opposed to trawling through Chris Pine’s examples. Building something from scratch and having a finished app that works, with working code on github, felt like such an achievement.

There were times I found things a little difficult though. Around mid-way through and again towards the end I came across a few exercises that for some reason I just couldn’t get my head round, I knew what I wanted the code to do, I understood how it would work, but the syntax was all wrong. Some of these problems I solved using google and as a last resort I reached out to my mentor who was incredibly helpful in pointing me in the right direction. But I realised in doing this, I had not only got the solution, but I was getting better at finding the answer when I wasn’t sure of a solution. I was getting better at navigating through stack-overflow and understanding posts and all of this is important because, as it has been explained to me a few times, there are going to be situations where I may not know what to do or how to do something and these sort of skills are going to be vital in finding the answer.

All in all, I thought this weeks content was brilliant and set everything up for the last week quite nicely.