My First Week At Lambda School đ
After graduating from college and beginning my working career, I spent a few years without a sense of direction or long-term goal for myself. Like so many of us, that soothing advice of âfollow your passionâ had led me down an expensive path.
On the one hand, Iâm lucky to have found personal fulfillment and life-long friendships that Iâll treasure forever. But if Iâm being honest, a 4-year degree and mountains of student loans were way too high of a price for the experience I needed for most entry-level jobs. A job which, in the field I chose, would unlikely pay me enough to make a dent in my student loans.
I knew it was time to make a change. And after some research, I knew that software development was right for me. But I didnât know how to get there.
Enter, Lambda School.
Between the rigorous lesson plan (a full month of Computer Science!), the fact that I wonât pay anything until after Iâm hired and earning at least $50K, and the thriving community of people in a similar mindset, this school was clearly the way to go. So I applied. I tore through the pre-course work, I beat the Lambda challenge, and was accepted(!!) for a July 2019 start date.
Monday
Lesson Plan: Semantic HTML, CSS selectors, CSS classes/IDs.
Three long months had gone by, and it was finally the big day. I woke up to a buzzing Slack channel full of excitement, nervous jitters, and GIFs (all coffee-related). The Lambda team instructed each of us to log into our Training Kit and watch the Day 1 videos that we found there. I found three videos; each a pre-recorded lecture covering the topics listed in the lesson plan noted above.
After an hourâs worth of self-study we started a 2-hour lecture with our (fantastic!) instructor Brittany Hemming. Brit explained the difference between semantic tags (<img> and <body>) vs. presentational tags (<b> or <span>). Then we learned the basics of styling a website by manipulating font colors and text sizes. Brit introduced us to classes and IDs, and we used those to slice & dice sections of our webpage, styling each of those differently.
Tuesday
Lesson Plan: CSS content âBox Modelâ, Display property (Block vs. In-line), CSS rule resets, and both forking/cloning a repository using GitHub & Git.
I would sound completely ridiculous comparing a coding bootcamp to actual military bootcampâŠbut if Lambda has a Hell Day, then this was it. Compared to Monday and to the rest of the week, the rush of new concepts we were shown felt like crawling through rainwater & mud.
Why was Tuesday so rough? Because my teachers werenât holding back. We were shown code editors, Git, and the command-line interface for the first time, PLUS the dayâs new code concepts. We needed everything to complete the dayâs challenge, and while I personally find it exhilarating when Iâm just barely keeping up, that feeling can be a major source of anxiety for students.
That being said, one of the best features of Lambda by far is their community. Anybody who felt overwhelmed was encouraged to ask for help, and I saw constant support and encouragement from the more-experienced students.
Brit started us off with the CSS Box Model which (for those readers who arenât familiar) is the usual method for organizing any item that youâll see on a web page. For example, the Medium logo on this page isnât squeezed into the top-left corner because of 1) an invisible border around the logo and 2) lots of empty space - both outside of the border (margin) and between the border and the logo (padding).
For Tuesdayâs project, we downloaded HTML & CSS files from GitHub for a fake digital design agency. We applied our new-found knowledge of layout & design to finish those web pages, and just like that, weâd built our first website!
Lambda tries to re-create what itâs like to work in a professional environment, so rather than creating our own designs, we replicated a mockup design. As somebody whoâs spent time around a marketing department I had a lot of fun connecting the dots between my code and the UI/UX teamâs concept.
Wednesday
Lesson Plan: Flexbox, flex containers & items.
**audible sigh of relief from all Lambda students**
One thing I had left out from Tuesday - we were purposely designing sites the hard way. As soon as we learned about Flexbox(!!) and scrapped all of the design work we had done the day prior, things were suddenly a lot more fun!
Imagine a list of videos on YouTube. If youâre designing this page then you donât want all the video images stacked on top of each other, so you need to tell your site how much space should fall in between each of them. Now, what you could say is âGive me 40 pixels of empty space above video 1, 40 pixels below video 1, 60 pixels to the right of video 1, and then for video 2 give me 40 pixels above, 20 belowâŠâ like in example 1 below. OR when you use Flexbox you could just say âGive me an even amount of empty space above & below ALL of my videos, no matter how many videos I haveâ (a la Example 2).
And then go for a long walk- you just saved yourself a massive headache.
For Wednesdayâs project, we re-designed our webpage from Tuesday using Flexbox (âDisplay: flex;â instead of âDisplay: block;â). After that was finished, we built a new webpage for the Services page of our digital agency, listing out 6 of the products they offer. Iâm not exaggerating when I say that compared to Tuesday, it took me half the time.
Thursday
Lesson Plan: Versioning & control flows with Git, branching a repository, pull requests, command-line Git commands.
My computer speaks to me. Up until Thursday it hadnât said a word, or at least, nothing I could understand. But that all changed after our crash-course to the Command Line Interface. From now on, the CLI is what Iâll use to create & navigate hidden files, search CPU memory, and read my laptopâs feedback on what it found for me.
In all honesty, I thought Thursday was the easiest day of the week. Weâd been submitting our projects through GitHub by way of the command line since Tuesday, so I was already familiar with some of the steps. But the repetition helped me remember this new material and then we got to explore some more complicated ideas.
Which brings me to our stretch goals- every day at Lambda involves a project based on the lectureâs material. Students pass if they accomplish the MVP (minimum viable product), but there are always a few (optional) extra steps which get you higher marks. Thursdayâs MVP project was to 1) clone & fork an example GitHub repository, then once the files were downloaded locally to our computerâs Git implementation, 2) create our own branch instead of using the âmasterâ version and 3) submit this new branch as a pull request.
I finished this early and moved on to our stretch goals, which involved researching the difference between âmergeâ & ârebaseâ commands, along with merge conflicts and how to resolve those. Do I know how to resolve a merge conflict? Not one clue! But the way I see it, even trying the stretch goals every day is like a few extra reps at the gymâŠthe extra work isnât helpful in one day, but over months Iâll see new muscles and definition that wouldnât be there without it.
Friday
Lesson Plan: Sprint Challenge đ±
The moment of truth! Lambda structures every week so that we cover new material on Monday through Thursday. Then on Friday, weâre tested by a pass/fail 3-hour long âsprintâ (a la Agile in the real world) based on what weâve learned.
Since Week 1 was all about designing the user interface, our test involved two web pages we had to build halfway from scratch. Students were given two mock designs, the website copy, and image files â all of which we needed to download into our local Git directory. Then we added HTML tags to organize the content, CSS properties to throw in some splashes of color, and answered some questions about the concepts (like âWhy is the CSS Box Model useful?â).
Whatever nervousness I felt walking into the sprint challenge completely disappeared when I read the prompt and saw we had covered everything I needed to know. It took me about 2 hours before I was finished, and then I started on the stretch goals (building a Contact page with text fields).
Will that confidence slip over time? Definitely yesâŠI had an edge since this weekâs lessons overlapped with content that we learned in our pre-course material. Will I feel just as confident in 6 months, when Iâm tested on assigning low-level memory using C?
Jokes aside, what Iâve noticed in my first week above all else is that the Lambda staff really are invested in me. I mean that both literally and figuratively- the school wonât earn any money from me until after Iâve graduated and started work, earning a minimum of $50,000.
Beyond the money, every interaction Iâve had with somebody from the school- the teachers, students, and support staff- all came from a really positive place. Spending 4+ hours a day coding can make you feel really isolated, and the constant encouragement goes a very long way.
Would I recommend this to everyone? No, itâs not for somebody who needs direction from their teacher before they can get to work. But if youâre hungry to learn one of the most in-demand skillsets in the world, maybe you should look at Lambda School.
