Day 1: I’m going to be professional!
A day has gone by, and a boy has done a few things.
(I’m sorry, I’m still trying to shake off Game of Thrones fever. Aren’t you? That season finale was so tastefully made I’m sure I’m going to rewatch it down the road!)
Two small challenges done on Free Code Camp
I had about half the day free today and spent that on freecodecamp.com learning some JavaScript. Completed two small challenges:
- “Wherefore art thou”, which requires you to write an algorithm to find objects in an array of objects that contain a given object.
- “Search and replace”, which requires you to write another algorithm to replace a word with another given word while preserving the case of the original word being replaced.
I have a feeling I did the first one in a long-winded way. There’s probably a more straightforward way than mine, which was to store the property name (names if more than one) of the given object, check if the value of those properties are identical to any of the objects in the array of objects, and ‘push’ those objects into a new array, which is returned at the end.
In non-code speak, my approach was to write code to:
find out how many things are inside the given capsule (‘object’) → find out what the things inside it are called (‘key’) and their corresponding values (‘value’) → tally that with the bunch of capsules given (‘array of objects’) to find out which ones contain the same key-value pairs → spit out the filtered bunch capsules (a new ‘array’) from the bunch that resemble the initial one.
Sometimes I’ll get the feeling that the code could have been cleaner. But I don’t beat myself up for most of these challenges though. It’s much more important to be able to make the program work than to write the most succinct and elegant code when learning. Different story if I’m writing code for an actual product to be used by thousands.
As for the second challenge I completed, that was pretty straightforward.
We moved around quite a bit today. We went from home to the function room downstairs (Mei was teaching make-up to two earnest students), before we made our way to the workshop to change the engine oil from my motorcycle. Had lunch there, went home, then I started to code again.
Just before we got home I received a phone call that I’d been anticipating. A call from a guy named Mitch.
Enrolling in GA’s WDI course in Singapore
Mitch is the ‘Admissions Producer’ at General Assembly Singapore. First of all, I know — what’s with all the funky titles nowadays? I don’t know.
General Assembly on the other hand, I know. It’s a popular company in the tech circles that train non-technical people into Web Developers, User Experience/User Interface Designers, Data Scientists and more. They boast very high rates of graduates who become employable in their chosen field of study after just three months.
I applied earlier this week, did their pre-admissions ‘tests’ and spoke to Mitch about my current situation and motivation to pick up web development skills. Today they called to offer me a slot in their August intake. I’m slated to start down the path of becoming a professional web developer on Monday, 15th August!
But the decision wasn’t easy. I’d made some promises to travel with my family a few months before this opportunity came. In this case, it was the wonderful alignment between a growing interest in coding and the opportunity to learn that made the decision a no-brainer.
Besides, responsible adults everywhere (including the one perched on top of my eyebrows) are yelling at me to take control of my own destiny, or something like that, so I’m deciding to to do the ‘right’ thing.
I’m excited about this, but I’m going to have to adjust my strategy a bit to fit this new trajectory. I’ve been devouring a lot of web development resources and writing HTML/CSS/JavaScript for the past two months, and if I keep going at this pace, I believe the value of GA’s Web Development Immersive course to me would diminish. The way I think about it is…
Why waste willpower (enthusiasm, actually) on learning something I’m going to be paying someone to make me learn?
Assuming my interest doesn’t wane by August, I should be able to rely on the rigorous curriculum to learn everything I need to learn to be a proficient junior web developer.
So from tomorrow onwards, I’ll be paring down the amount of time I spend learning web dev and dedicating more time to hacking hardware — ie. mechatronics and software. I haven’t found a good hardware crash course that is similar to GA’s WDI course yet, so I’m relying on Instructables, Hackaday and my fascination with hardware to pick it up.
