Day 8. Makers Academy. Bank Holiday Monday!
Although Makers Academy was officially ‘stood down’ for the bank holiday, this didn’t stop the work and with predictable accuracy and timeliness, an email come through on Sunday night, detailing our pair partners for the following day.
I had enjoyed a weekend back in Bristol and during an interesting mix of writing a basic air traffic control simulation program, and painting my garden fence, I was ready to return to London for the bank holiday pair programming.
As Makers Academy was shut, my pair programming partner and I opted to use the excellent facilities at the Ace Hotel Cafe, in Shoreditch. This was a cool, ‘trendy’ cafe, who are more than welcoming to techies, looking for a cool and fashionable place to code and work on projects. The cafe was awash with illuminated apple logos and metallic laptops, with a fervent atmosphere.
This week’s challenge is to build on our previous knowledge, and consolidate basic Test Driven Development (TDD), Object Orientated Programming and a few other processes in order to write a program to simulate the Oyster Card system used on the London Underground. I was quite surprised after just a few days working intensely on writing a boris bike simulation program, and working on the airport challenge over the weekend, how much is actually sinking in and sticking. I have a lot to learn, and am still struggling in developing logical solutions to some of the challenges, but today was the first day when I thought that I was actually making progress! Things are starting to make a little sense now. I was able to answer a lot of the questions in the challenge chapter introductions, and was even capable of writing some basic RSpec Unit Tests from scratch, without even having to refer to the documentation.
As I am finding with the process so far, it is a little like riding a rollercoaster. For every up day there is a down day- fingers crossed it will not be tomorrow!
