Catching Up | 2017 | And Beyond!
It’s been a long while, Medium! Where do we even begin? Let’s catch up by summarizing core elements that lead up to our last post, shall we?
So! The months of October, November, and December were jam-packed with critical lessons that extended vastly beyond our last post by HTML5 and some design-oriented excursions. We covered the basics of CSS (Cascading Style Sheets), its pre-processor, Sass(SCSS, you know, savory and sassy styles that adorn our skeletal HTML5 with some serious personality!) We jumped ship into the more object-oriented programming language with JavaScript and its API (application program interface) library companion, jQuery, which enabled functionality manipulators to really spring to life in our coding journey! We followed jQuery and JavaScript with React, a JavaScript-based library developed by Facebook and Instagram. The style includes elements that visually replicate HTML5, CSS/Sass, and JavaScript/jQuery syntaxes which were quite the surprise (both good and bad) especially right after learning those languages respectively. And, finally, we are head-over-heels in Ruby and Ruby on Rails; a dynamic, reflective, object-oriented programming language that plays well on data management/storage.
Around this time, the popularity of Array began to take its roots while ET kept the lot of us on the frontier, he also found time to bring on a welcomed relief on his behalf, in the form of a radical professor named Josh Sanderlin!
December saw a lot of activity and engagements with multiple projects and events (not including the learning of the aforementioned programming languages above.) Another fun, semi-extracurricular programming language we got to mess with was C# (C Sharp) within the Unity program, a cross-platform game engine where we got to follow along with building a mobile-game-app through video tutorials. It was quite the experience!
We ended on a happy note for Holiday Break by passing our first test which came at the halfway point of our course; albeit, with a mild percentage of the student body feeling more anxious than usual! But, somehow, we were able to retain the gushing fountain of educational information poured upon us relative to being a Full Stack Web Developer. :)
In a strange cast of theories, I am blown away by the approach we have been introduced to, from the educational standpoint. Of all of my friends over the past 10 years and so that have gone through college; of all the intricacies involved with other colleges’ social/student structures and cultures, there has never been an experience quite like the one I get to enjoy right now at Array.
As previously mentioned, our headmaster, ET, drawing inspiration from Finland’s education system, spawned a moldable-hybrid school structure from that first cast. And how elegantly-clever to take on the first class in such an awe-inspiring way and almost literally weave the structure through a breathable, creative atmosphere of learning by finding grace in teaming with some incredible local business peoples! And if The Paramount Cafe and Second Floor owners, Jon and Renee Jelinek, hadn’t been there, I don’t think we could have achieved this kind of atmosphere! And it’s just what Cheyenne Downtown needed!
I look forward towards our graduation date! Sure, it’s only barely been a full month in 2017 and we are not due until the first of April; and despite the national tensions, I am confident that the right people and ideas are in their places, ready to properly and unintentionally spread the good vibes for Cheyenne and all of Wyoming, and to lead way for multiple communities to flourish at the natural rate with which we choose.
Ah, there is so much to say, and yet, there is still much to see! Until next time, folks!
