“Hello World!” is something I have typed many times over the past weeks, while going through some Ruby tutorials during my pre-course at Makers Academy. And typing the same two words over and over can drive someone crazy. Good. Crazy is something I have signed up for.

Today is the second day of the 12-week coding bootcamp I am doing at Makers Academy, which I hope will allow me to gain enough knowledge to be able to build a MVP by myself. (I recently quit a job in the financial industry to create a startup which will be web-based).

This will be an intensive and challenging journey. But I already know it will be worth it. I will learn loads of new stuff and I will meet and talk with interesting people from various backgrounds.

On the first day, Jordan (Director of Marketing at MA) recommended the students to write a blog. This would allow us to track our progress in the learning curve and give us some *comfort*, should we hit a wall.

Given that we are at MA from 9am to 6pm (many students stay later to work on projets) I quickly listed the things I’d rather do (or should do) with my *spare time* than write a blog :

  • Work on my business plan
  • Go to the gym
  • Pass my driving license
  • Have cheese & wine
  • Play with my cat
  • Watch season 2 of The Americans
  • Read about the latest scary developments of the Ebola outbreak in West Africa.
  • Sleep

And here am I. Creating this blog on an impulse.

Day 1

On the first day we got to know a little bit about our co-Makers and MA team members. Everyone talked about their likes / dislikes and a quirky thing about them.

Enrique (Head of Education at Makers) introduced us to the concept of objet-oriented programming and the use of class-responsibility-collaboration cards with a little group project/game about Boris’ bikes. This would be the basis of this week project, which is to build Boris’ bikes system.

We spent the rest of the afternoon pair-programming on the project. Currently, I am pair-programming with Ana, and it’s great to have 2 brains and 4 eyes to look for potential (sneaky) bugs in the code, especially when in the evening your brain is asking for a break and your eyes are becoming sticky.

When I went back home I felt exhausted. The amount of new information to absorb was overwhelming. But at the same time it brought me a great sense of satisfaction.

 

Day 2

Today we had more lectures from Enrique and did more pair-programming. It seems that we will spend a great deal of time pair-programming, since the best way to learn to code…is to actually code.

Highlights of the day:

  • At lunch time, two programmers from AlphaSights gave us a talk about continuous integration. It’s always interesting to see how the best practices we learn in theory are applied in the real world.
  • In the afternoon, I went to the meditation session given by Dana (Chief Joy Office at MA). I felt relaxed and reenergized after. Now, I am looking forward to doing yoga with Dana.