Starting the New Year at Array
It’s been too long since I have stopped in and written a blog post! We are a few short weeks into 2017, yet, it feels as if months have passed. Things have changed dramatically since the middle of November here at Array. One of the biggest was the addition of our new professor, Josh Sanderlin. Josh is our professor for the back-end portion of our schooling. Other than that we have made huge strides in our education since I last posted anything. After our journey into SCSS, we began learning JavaScript and jQuery, a JavaScript framework, as well as venturing into some C# and Unity game development as an intro to Object Oriented Programming and getting a taste of something new as we were ahead of schedule and it was a good supplemental tool. We also got a crash course in React development too. React is an extremely powerful JavaScript framework that is used, and was developed, by Facebook that allows for dynamic creation of web pages as needed instead of hard coding everything in so it is more flexible than it otherwise would have been. Finally, our current path has been learning Ruby and the amazing Ruby framework, Ruby on Rails.
The start of the new year was the beginning of our journey down the road of learning Ruby and Ruby on Rails. Ruby and Rails are the opposite side of the spectrum from our first three months here at Array in that they are the back-end portion of our curriculum so there is less intial focus on the appearance of our projects and more focus on the aspect of writing functional code.
Ever since we began working with Ruby and Rails, I truly feel that I have found what I want to do when we get out of school. I will be the first to admit that I am not the strongest designer and I don’t do as well as others when it comes to making something extremely visually appealing, but I feel that I flourish in the back-end and writing the code to make a project functional. As odd as it may sound, I thoroughly enjoy banging my head against the code wall and the sense of accomplishment I get when it all finally clicks and I get through that one little problem that was driving me crazy. That being said I feel that my classmates are all beginning to find their niche in the world of development as well, whether that is front-end design or back-end development. As we reach the point where we all find our passions I am looking forward to not only the projects we will continue to work on as a group but also seeing where each of us ends up employed once we finish school in April. It will almost certainly be as wildly varying as our personalities and passions in the field are. It is also mildly intimidating to think that in only 2 short months we will be taking the culmination of our skills developed here at Array into the work place and hopefully can begin to be strong brand ambassadors for the school as well as for ourselves. I’m certain that next time I post there will be just as much or more excitement to be seen as well! We have exciting events and speakers coming up as usual. Until next time, thanks for stopping by!
