Being Knowledge-Motivated
Mobile Makers Day 1 — Storyboard Actions and Outlets
Today was a pretty decent day. It wasn’t as stressful as I had imaged although I’m expecting long evenings in the near future.
Today was a lot of introductions, logistics, an overviews and a little pep talk. The group of instructors seem very nice and very knowledgable. Also all the students seem very open and pleasant. I think it will be a great cohort.
Of the few notes I took, there was a quote on a slide by Brandon that said:
Start identifying with what you want to become. What’s the best way to become an iOS Developer? Start saying you are an iOS Developer (as an identity)
That hit home for me. That is the reason I’m in the class. I still don’t feel the confidence to say I am an iOS Developer, because I don’t have the experience. I expect to identify myself as an iOS Developer at the end of this journey.
Then we did a bit of a very lightweight training session and a challenge. The challenge is to complete an app via a set of instructions.
The challenge is done in groups of two, which they called “paired programming”. This is where one developer is at the keyboard, typing what the other is dictating, while the other person reads the tasks and says what to do. I’m not sure how well it worked in that fashion but I think the most important thing was the communication. Being able to communicate the thought process and figuring out conceptual problems in a discussion. It was fairly simple for me, but I wanted to make sure that I’m able to communicate my thoughts and logic to my partner. She was very analytical and kept us on target as to some of the code that I probably would not have picked up.
We created a calculator app and I’m proud to say that we finished the challenge as well as the two additional “stretches”. These are stretch goals that are not covered by the class and require more research. I’m sure that studying the pre-work and also having previous (partial) experience helped.
It was really good to talk through the steps, figure out what we needed to do and also explain to each other what we were thinking.
The tasks were broken down into simple steps. For me, it helped reinforce the idea of type transition (translating strings to numbers, etc) as well as figuring out the slider control (again). I liked talking through what was needed, for example, we new that the UISlider control had a ‘value’ attribute but we didn’t exactly know how to call an action whenever the slider was moved. I was able to show a little bit of my analytic ability by throwing in log statements to validate what we didn’t know (or what we were assuming was happening).
I think it is a very good skill to be able to figure out “what the code is thinking”.
The next thing we figured out was being able to turn the slider values into integer values by using the lroundf function. This is new to me and I need to be able to pull that from my hip pocket in the future.
Finally, we had to figure out how to determine if a number was evenly divisible by another. We did some fast research and ended up using modulo (or modulus?). This displays the remainder after a number is divided. So if it is divisible by 3 with a modulo of zero, we knew it was evenly divisible.
I still need to post it to GitHub and review it a bit. We will be reviewing the challenge in the morning.
Until then, I can celebrate a small victory of getting through the day!