Second Week of Array
Well, week 2 of Array School has been equally stimulating compared to week one! Let me first start this next paragraph off by mentioning and giving my input on our systemic framework as far as education/teaching/learning goes.
ET has mentioned an influence of how our structure is layered down the road; drawing heavily from Finland’s education system. While it is recently-stated/recognized globally as probably one of the best approaches, and now having a minor exposure to a custom take on it, I have to say… It definitely works! And while a 2-hour lunch may seem counter-productive, there is a peculiar relish to it that propagates a creative flow (or so far that I’ve seen) from it. From all of it, actually! The lack of homework and the idea of “unplugging” from school? Yeah, it works. And I am deeply humbled to be a part of Array!
Throughout our second week, we learned just as much (if not slightly more) than we did last week. We revisited tables and forms in HTML5 in better detail which wasn’t all too difficult. I think my biggest fault with it is just remembering functions of particular selectors; I tend to reassign attributes to other selectors by accident. It might be because of their similar output values. But, it hasn’t kept me from finding new ways to code efficiently!
We watched a documentary called Lo and Behold which covered the past, present, and future of the beautiful entity we call the Internet and its influence over society. It made for a very interesting piece and was directed by Werner Herzog. I would definitely recommend giving it a view or two!
A little over halfway through the week, we went on a crash-course ride through Amazon’s Web Service or AWS. Alongside a website called Hover.com, we students followed suit with ET on setting up our own domains and learning how to link it through DNS servers across the globe! The experience was quite the hassle! A good one, of course! But, nonetheless, a very necessary part of our learning. One that I am thankful to hear will only need tending once a year. ;)
The lot of us ended up claiming domain names as our full (or almost full) names. Example — daveewaliko.com, or www.daveewaliko.com!
On Friday, we downloaded a design app called Sketch and we had our first taste towards the end of class on Friday, and continued our experience this third week. Sketch is mostly a front-end tool, but incorporates its usefulness into back-end developing too! It takes some serious time and effort to grasp the program as a whole, though. Monday and Tuesday were spent mostly on an introduction to the app, and in that introduction, we were all assigned an icon by ET to try and replicate (which was actually a lot of fun!)
As I am writing this on a Wednesday night, our agenda today was mostly spent watching a masterclass tutorial on Sketch and attempting to implement the content as we went along. Not going to lie — I almost started to lose my focus toward the end of the day. We absorbed A LOT of information keeping up with new terms, key shortcuts for Sketch, and just following along in general. Thankfully, tomorrow, we’ll be spending most of our day applying what we learned today…or, you know, what our brains managed to scavenge out of the intensity!
