Bootcamp, make me a developer!

Phew, what an exciting week!! Why, you ask? I've started my coding bootcamp!

What does this mean? For the next 15 weeks I am going to spend night and day to learn, love, and code. I am not alone on my journey - 20 other enthusiastic individuals are experiencing this journey with me. With the help of our instructors we will be giving our all to be job-ready at the end of the bootcamp.

Before Day 1 I was nervous and not sure what to expect. And I did not expect to love this experience from the first hours I entered this school. The culture that this bootcamp establishes is focused on making the group bond. You've probably played silly icebreaker and name games before. Yes, this is exactly what we have been doing for the first three days. Silly, but - it works!

So what's the verdict, now that we are at the end of Day 4? I love it :) I go to bed and I look forward to going to school. The atmosphere here is friendly, open, relaxed, concentrated. The schedule is diverse, a mix of self-study time, lectures, reviews with instructors, and mingling events.

The space feels light with its high ceilings, large windows. And it shows that the school put some thought into design - graffiti wall, inspirational quotes, wall decor... Another plus is that the school is in the middle of FiDi (Financial District), in a beautiful and vibrant neighborhood at the water. There are lots of eating out options around us and if you wanna chill at the water during lunch break you can. Most important, it feels like a place where staff and students are happy.

And coding-wise? It's been pretty light so far. We have been covering introductory topics, and have been mostly doing revision of pre-work. All students were required to prepare material at home before on-campus classes started. What I was especially excited about was that we were already working with APIs. It's always been a black box for me, something I was too afraid to touch all alone at home. Here at school, Tony our lead instructor made it so tangible! A few lines of code and we were tapping into the famous PokeAPI. And for the rest of the day we were building a simple command line application to query the Star Wars API. I did it! No more fear of APIs! After all, they were built to be accessible for users.

There were some things that were especially interesting to me. Let's call them Fun Facts.

Fun Fact #1: Git is not github! We are using github on a daily basis but the version control is actually handled by git. Github is where the remote repos live.

Fun Fact #2: Have you always wondered what the difference between "git pull" and a "pull request" is? With the former command you are pulling and merging changes from a remote repo to your local machine. A pull request is totally different! It makes a request to the repo owner: "Please look at my code and if you like it, merge it with your stuff." And while we are at it: the difference between "merge" and a "pull request"? A merge happens locally while the pull request is created on github.

Enough about github.

Fun Fact #3: Let's call this category "Time and Life Savers".

Have you ever been bothered by 46 failing tests and scrolling for minutes to get to the first one in your terminal? Try "rspec --f-f" to fail fast and your screen will beautifully display only one (first) failed test.

And for all Atom users: how many times have you misspelled "def initialize"? Worry no more - type "dfi" and tab - and see the magic happen!

What about huge clunky json files that hurt your eyes? Invest a few seconds into downloading the Chrome extension "json" and make your life easier with a nice data tree.

*applause*

No need to thank me!