My every day bike ride to school over Brooklyn Bridge
People relaxing in Battery Park
The energy at school is buzzing like a busy beehive
FiDi is amazing for lunch breaks! It has millions of lunch options...
Restaurants put up huge spaces for serving outside
And there are SO many places to sit and eat your lunch outside. Parks, benches, trees, waterfront...
Find the Statue of Liberty in this picture!
We had our first week of Javascript and it was all about syntax. To our surprise the labs that were deployed had already been part of the bootcamp prep. So many of us had already completed these labs. Honestly this week I felt like unemployed (well, technically I am) - unproductive and unmotivated, sometimes even bored. I signed up for Treehouse to get access to their React videos, but our lead instructor advised me against going forward on my own. The reasoning is that we are going to build our own version of React before actually using it, so that we understand what is going on behind the scenes. Makes sense. He suggested I start working on my end project, the big one that is presented at the end of the program. I already have an idea and I will need to grow it.
That said, the new curriculum included some new cool elements that shook things up a bit:
Codewars! They introduced code challenges into our curriculum! Fun! Coding challenges is mainly how I learned coding before starting the bootcamp and I realized how much I had missed it!
Interview Prep - We paired up and took turns in being interviewer and interviewee. It was alot of fun and an interesting experience to code under time pressure, with somebody staring at your code, and most of all: talking through every single step. When we code we are silent, most of the coding is going on in our head. It is harder than it sounds to actually verbalize what is going on in one's mind because it forces you to sort through your convoluted thoughts...
And also there are a few new things I learned this week:
"this" is defined by WHO calls it and not WHERE it is.
Javascript has a crazy history. When it was created ten years ago, there were no standards and there were many competing versions of implementation. Thanks to an organization called ECMA the usage was standardized and made developer's lives worth living again!
Debugging: First make sure that the function is running at all, second make sure that the variables are what you think they are.
Currying - the term comes from Haskell Curry. Not only did that guy give his first name to the language Haskell, but also his last name for "currying" - he's made it!
What actually is "currying"? Hm that one was hard to understand but Wiki gives us this: "[...] currying is the technique of translating the evaluation of a function that takes multiple arguments (or a tuple of arguments) into evaluating a sequence of functions, each with a single argument". There.
Ajax!
Don't use "var". Use "let".
ES6 has classes!
"Syntactic Sugar" - makes a language "sweeter" to use for developers but actually does not add new functionality. Example: ES6 classes.
At the weekend I faced some challenges. On Friday they deployed many big labs for practicing Ajax and using multiple APIs. Learning how to deal with APIs is fun, so I dove head first into the labs. However I hit a huge roadblock - I struggled to get the Spotify API working and had to deal with growing frustration. Another struggle are the technical blog posts. For some reason it is difficult to find a topic that I am interested in and that I would deem relevant for the rest of my classmates. And then there is the part of researching and writing it. It takes alot of time and I think with the progressing of the bootcamp time is getting sparse... Yes, no need to sugar coat anything - this is also life of a budding developer.
Let's see how next week goes! Monday is school, Tuesday is the Fourth of July.
