“How do you know I’m mad?” said Alice. “You must be,” said the Cat, “or you wouldn’t have come here.”
I’ve just finished week 7 of the intensive coding bootcamp, Makers Academy.
I now understand why they call it, ‘Oxbridge meets the Marines, for Developers.’ I am absolutely exhausted. I have coded every day for the last 48 days. It’s been exhilarating, amazing, and frustrating. I can’t believe how much I’ve learned. I can’t believe how much I still have to learn.
So what have I been up to?
Well since I last wrote (25 days ago), I have test-driven the development of:
- a Rock, Paper, Scissors app in Ruby / Sinatra (by myself)
- a Bookmark Manager app in Ruby / Sinatra, which we deployed to Heroku (in pairs — different partner each day)
- a Twitter clone in Ruby / Sinatra (by myself)
- two small apps (FizzBuzz and an Airport app) in JavaScript (in pairs)
- an AirBnb clone — in Ruby, JavaScript and jQuery(in a group)
- a Thermostat app in JavaScript, using OpenWeatherMap’s API (in pairs)
- a Bowling Game in JavaScript (by myself)
- a front-end, single-page Notes app in JavaScript and Node (in pairs)
- a front-end, single-page News app in JavaScript and Node, using the Guardian’s API (by myself this weekend, once I’ve finished this post)
This front-end, single page app stuff is cool!
Learning by doing. And making a lot of mistakes.
If you look at my Github (https://github.com/francesmx) you’ll see that most of these apps aren’t particularly impressive, and actually there are tonnes of mistakes in them, which you always realise in hindsight but have no time to fix because we’re always onto the next thing. But having that awareness is key. I feel like I’ve moved from blissful but unproductive ignorance into conscious incompetence. And I feel pretty comfortable there because I know what I need to do next.
Also to be fair, we have covered a massive amount of ground in a short space of time. I thought it was hard combining object-oriented development with test-driven development from day one, but then they threw in JavaScript, then HTML, CSS, jQuery, Node, APIs — what the hell. And then this week, they made us do test-driven development without a library. It was nuts!
Moving from Ruby to JavaScript.
For the first four weeks, we focused purely on Ruby (beautiful, gorgeous, joyous Ruby). Then in week 5 we switched to JavaScript. This was tough! JavaScript is such a different beast. I have to admit, I hated it at first. Ruby is beautiful and elegant, and JavaScript is full of punctuation and weirdness. But I’ve come to appreciate it. Also you can’t really be a web developer without an understanding of JavaScript.
I think it’s really great that Makers have given us exposure to a classical language like Ruby and a prototypal language like JavaScript. They made us recreate two of our Ruby apps in JavaScript, and that was pretty fascinating a) because it was actually reasonably straightforward to do and b) because we realised that JavaScript behaves so differently to Ruby, particularly when it comes to inheritance (being class-free and all). A lot of us have struggled with this (and I mean ‘this’ in both senses — some of you will get that haha!) I can tell you that I’ve become a dab hand at de-bugging using the console. Well at least in identifying the source of bugs, not so much fixing them.
I asked my fellow cohort yesterday, ‘whom would you rather marry — Ruby or JavaScript?’ and perhaps surprisingly, all of those who answered went for JavaScript — preferring its complexity and intrigue over Ruby’s obvious beauty. I think this is true of many things in life.
Next week, we’re onto Rails. I’m excited!
Thanks again for reading.
Frances x
P.S. If you fancy a geeky laugh, check out this short video: https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/wat.
