Now brewing… ☕️

Hey y’all. Last week was rough. You know I’m in the weeds when I’m not blogging. (Read: I have nothing nice to say about code when I’m not blogging!)

We wrapped up back-end fundamentals with several large projects. I ended up over-engineering a project and it took me probably 3x as long as it should’ve. Our cohort stress level was so tangible that I brought in cookies for #EatYourFeelingsFriday…. (I come by this nurture-with-food thing honestly. They don’t call granny Grandma Cookies for nothing!)

Well, that’s over and we can all be thankful.

NOW it’s time for language focus. I ended up choosing Java because nothing in this world runs without the stuff. You know, coffee! ☕️

In all seriousness: Going into this program I fully expected to be a gung-ho front end person. I majored in journalism and graphic design, for Pete’s sake. But I also love logic and even considered law school at one point in my life.

A few reasons I chose Java for this season of my #CodingJourney:

1. It’s a true object-oriented programming language.
2. I’m interested in learning Swift (the primary language used in developing apps for iPhone and iPad), and Java seemed like a good foundation for that. Plus, Android apps run on Java, so it wouldn’t be a huge stretch to learn some tricks about mobile development on that platform.
3. Back-end engineering was challenging for me. And you know when I say challenging, that means I had fun.
4. If I’m going to learn it, I better take advantage of this immersive atmosphere here at The Iron Yard.

Today was our first day and I was really excited to write two baby programs in Java. One is a number guessing game: the program generates a random number, then allows the user up to 6 guesses. The other was a pseudo-calculator that takes two numbers and returns the sum, difference, product, quotient, and remainder of those numbers.

I’m looking forward to learning this second language. The pain of learning JavaScript has resulted in (what feels like) a good platform for diving a little deeper into Java.

And with that,

public void goodnight(friends) {
System.out.println(“Sleep tight “ + friends);
}