Ruby Recap!
Time flies! Realised my first post was pretty much a history lesson/ranting session so, I’m gonna take this time to reflect on what I learned so far at Alpha Camp! :)
For the first few lessons, we went through the basics of Computational Thinking, Ruby language syntax & programming methodologies. This combination of technical + theory stuff proved to be extremely important for our following work — it changed our approach towards solving problems.

Computational Thinking Process
Decomposition of the problem, Pattern Recognition to find trends, Abstraction — where we develop instructions to solve a problem/steps for a task, and lastly Algorithm, to generalize patterns & trends into rules/principles.
Thankfully, having a programming background in JavaScript & other languages learned in school allowed me to understand the first 3 but Algorithm still seems very complicated for me. At least, this thinking process has improved the way I practice!
Coding Practice
We then moved on to a series of Leetcode exercises (leetcode.com) to hone our skills. The format for these few lessons involved the instructor taking some of our code examples — and we’ll review it together in class. I think it’s such a useful process because we all see and learn together! Really glad lessons here are not like the conventional ‘lecture’ style, that doesn’t work well for me.
We also tried setting up repositories in Github (using git Bash!) and also codewars (codewars.com) exercises. With the basics set-up, we were soon ready to take on our first assignment — a TicTacToe game in Ruby :)
3 things I learned through these Ruby exercises:
- Always challenge yourself to think of an easier,simpler method to solve the problem. You may have a rough idea, but unlike JavaScript and other languages, Ruby will amaze you.
- Get used to reading, searching, understanding documentation and others’ explanations (i.e. Stack Overflow) When we attempt the problem, we think through it once. When we read what others have wrote and try to understand, we get to learn a few more things that may help us with our logical or technical understanding
- Note-taking is important. There are times during code review that I realized, I’ve learned something and taken it down before but not used it. Or learning something new through code snippets I saw before. We’ll need to repeat the process of Checking > Understanding > Doing multiple times before it gets into our head.
It’s been a great start to the boot camp, and I’m looking forward for more! Can’t wait to link everything up together in a real project :)
Thanks for Reading! I’m Kelvin, I code, I dance, and I eat. Find out more or contact me at kedanco.com
