Day 4

It’s 9pm and I’m leaving MA only now because during the last two hours I was coding playing Pictionary with co-Makers.

Today’s lectures were about:

• Inheritance and composition. Both allow coders not to repeat themselves (a core principle of coding) when creating objects which share the same characteristics. Inheritance applies when we are dealing with several objects of the same “family” (or class). Composition is for objects of different classes (I will write more about objects and classes in a future post).

• Blocks, procs, and lambdas (no, I’m not making up random words).

The major part of my day was spent splitting hairs with Ana (my current pair-programming partner).

This week, we are trying to re-create the system that manages Boris bikes. In this project, among different objects, we have vans which can collect broken bikes from docking stations and can also drop them off to garages for repair. For a while, we tried to figure out whether a van knew that it should go to a garage after collecting broken bikes or not. If it doesn’t, how can we know that the van won’t just hang around after collecting the broken bikes and chat some minis instead of doing its job and go to the garage to drop off these damn bikes?

It may look silly but that’s actually the sort of questions we have to ask ourselves continuously in order to write the test cases used in TDD. In this precise case, it turned out that we were trying to make things more complex than necessary.

Thus, it was not a very productive day due to all these *useless* digressions, but it taught me an lesson: when it comes to coding, better keep things simple whenever possible.

I also learned the following words: buttercup, thumb twiddling,  and chatterbox, all thanks to the amazing drawing skills of my co-Makers.

Day 3

I don’t feel like writing detailed recaps, so here is a brief outline of what we did today.

• At 9am two students from the senior cohort (I am in the September (junior) cohort, which started on September 15th; the senior cohort started 6 weeks before us) gave us a lecture on CSS. For those interested in CSS, you can check this link.
• 9.30am Enrique introduced us to the concept of “double” in coding, which is used in the London school of TDD – so far, we had been writing our tests Chicago style. London is said to be superior to Chicago as it is a more agile way of doing things.
• 12.30pm An external lecturer talked about the issues we can face when coding time. Coding the *right* time seems to be very complex indeed.
• 2.30pm Steve (teaching assistant at MA)’s lecture was about regular expression, and the main conclusion was to …avoid using them when writing code. You can play around with the regular expressions with Rubular.

Guess what we did during the rest of the day? dadadadada…Pair-programming. Surprise!

Random thoughts …

• The setting at MA.

The main area is a big open space. In the back of the room, there are several rows of desks with screens for (pair-)programming, as you would expect. The *cool* area is the front of this open space, where MA teachers and other coders from the tech industry give us lectures. It’s cool because we seat on beanbags (very comfy, especially the green ones) during these lectures, and it’s also the space where we do yoga (see ‘Balance’). But this also means that a heavy lunch is not recommended if you don’t want to be caught taking a nap during the afternoon lecture.

• Balance

From day 1, MA encouraged us to do some physical activity. That our brain will suffer is a given. Thus, we have to take care of our body to avoid burnout. Not easy to go to the gym when you are supposed to be coding during all your waking hours. Luckily, we have the possibility to have yoga classes and meditation sessions in situ, with Dana. Isn’t it cool to do a sun salutation in the middle of your classroom?

• Music

Before each lecture, a song is played to announce that it is going to start. It seems to be a different song each time. This morning it was the James Bond theme (because the topic of the lecture was ‘how to use a double’). Awesome.

• Diversity

People from different countries study at MA. In the current two cohorts, there are people from France, Germany, Portugal, Singapore, Spain, Switzerland and the US (and maybe more). I hope I will improve my English and my accent now that I am no longer working at home, and talk with actual people during the day.

Hello World!

“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.