Bootcamp Life Week 4
- Quynh
- Jun 11, 2017
- 3 min read
Time flies! I can't believe it is already the end of week 4!
After the project week, we were going back to our self-study sessions. This means labs, labs, labs.
(A 'lab' is what our coding school calls their test-driven exercises that they deploy for their students.)
By the way, the AC is constantly blasting full throttle and we are freezing! After sitting at the desk in this home made Antarctica for 8 hours per day it is a miracle that none of us have lost any limbs yet.
This is me working inside, when it is summer outside:
No kidding, I am wearing my winter coat in June. Although - I admit that I might have put on the hood for the dramatization for this visual demonstration.
Topic-wise our curriculum was rich as usual. Love it! It feels like feeding our brains with astonishing and jaw dropping concepts every single day.
Monday - Rack, Sinatra
Tuesday - Sinatra MVC
Wednesday - Sinatra Forms
Thursday - Sinatra Active Record
Friday - Rails
Flatiron's curriculum follows an underlying concept. Students must understand the following:
For example, we will be developing apps with Rails. But before even touching Rails, first we must learn how to make things from scratch before we move to more abstract libraries and frameworks that build on top of these methods.
Consequently, the curriculum teaches how to set up routes and render html with Rack first, before moving to a Rack based web framework like Sinatra, which takes care of most what Rack does. Then we are introduced to Rails, which bundles many of Sinatra's capabilities into even more abstract packages, standardizing and automating many repetitive tasks - which honestly makes many of us happy!
So in the end, we will be able to understand how everything is working under the hood, enabling us to identify causes of errors and find solutions.
That said, chasing the green font in rspec for hours and hours by yourself becomes tedious... especially after the high energy intense pair programming from last week. Monday felt slow but ok, Tuesday felt harder, and by Wednesday many of us were border-line depression.
But then came Thursday. Group work!
We were teamed up with a classmate and we had the whole day to solve two giant labs. The day before our instructor Tony had announced the Group Lab Day with a side comment:
"As a measure, in the last cohort (before you), only two groups succeeded in solving both labs..."
Oho! Did he want to challenge us?
I was paired up with Amazing Amanda and it felt like so good to solve the challenges together: setting up a database with ActiveRecord and use Sinatra MVC structure and forms to build a CRUD web app. We were extremely focused, going through every error message thoroughly, testing step by step, and time flew by.
For everyone it was very welcome change to working with someone else and the energy around our cohort's table was buzzing! And before you knew it, it was 3 pm and the lab was solved! Hurray!
This is one of the most amazing experiences that I will take from this bootcamp. The rewarding exhilaration of pair programming: rowing in a boat together, through some rough streams and reaching the finish line at the end, proud and beaming.
However, at the end of the lab, we felt exhausted! Looking around the other tables, some had also just finished. And their faces looked about the same. Content, happy, but brain dead. So - how about the second lab? Nope. No one felt even close to attempting the next one.
Actually, Tony had said that his impression of our group was that our cohort was an group that had established stronger bonds than the other classes that he worked with. He had observed that we work with and talk to each other more. So "Yay!" for social, but "Boo" for ambition??
A propos social. We could not have found a more awesome ending of the week. One of our classmates invited us for Friday BBQ in his backyard in Park Slope, Brooklyn. It is a very pretty neighborhood near the great Prospect Park (bigger than Central Park). So after our Friday's "Feelings" session at school, we finished a bit earlier than usual and went out into the sun, enjoying a (finally!) warm summer evening...
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