Day 2: Guest Speaker, Terminal , and a Murder Mystery

It was interesting to begin today with a former Galvanize student getting up in front of the class and sharing about his experience here. I definitely benefitted from hearing from him. He spoke a lot about his job as an engineer at a really cool local company that he was able to secure just a month after graduating from Galvanize, so that was inspiring and motivating to me. I hope we have more former students come in and share about their experiences/give advice to us wannabe h4ck3r5 throughout the program.
Terminal, Bash, Unix…What the Shell?
We dove deep into the above terms today, and our instructor did a really good job explaining what the terminal and shell are. Basically, the shell is what we as programmers talk to in order to get to the terminal, and the shell tells the terminal what we are typing/what it means, and the terminal itself is a portal that allows us to DO STUFF.
After hearing all about the terminal, shell, and linux commands, we immediately put what we “learned” to the test and had to solve a REAL MURDER MYSTERY. Okay, maybe it wasn’t real, but it was actually a really well designed game/challenge.
Basically, we cloned a github repo with a bunch of files that we had to “investigate” in order to find out who committed a murder. It’s a bit convoluted and difficult to explain, but essentially we had to do a bunch of different basic Unix commands to access different directories and files to get clues and information. We worked in pairs and had to present our findings together at the end, and more importantly we had to explain how we got there.
The CLI murder mystery was a great way to really commit some of the most common commands to memory, and that activity took up most of the afternoon. Then we reviewed what we had accomplished and discussed what we will tackle tomorrow: Git and JavaScript basics. I am very excited about both, and now that our curriculum is online, I am off to read up on Git to try to be at least slightly prepared for tomorrow morning.

