Today, I hacked all day long at gSchool. The morning was spent working on the Encryptor tutorial with my classmate, Meeka Gayhart. I’d worked through this tutorial before, and felt a lot more comfortable with it this time around. The first time I did it, I created a little command line program for it, which was super fun. Unfortunately, Meeka and I didn’t have enough time to do that this morning.
In the afternoon, Rolen and I continued to work on the Event Manager tutorial as a pair. We finished all of the iterations, then moved on to refactoring the code. Thanks to the Github forking and merging we figured out yesterday, we were able to switch off as the active coder throughout the afternoon, while the other collaborated over Screen Hero again. Unfortunately, I had to leave before we could finish, so we decided to finish up the refactoring separately. In the morning, we’re going to compare our solutions.
The place where we left off was particularly interesting. The tutorial ends after walking you through the creation of a very messy file that has all kinds of methods and variables in it. We opted to try splitting the whole project into separate class files that are then required by the main ruby file. It’s my understanding that this is part of what Object Oriented Programming is all about. I’m definitely still a noob, so this was a way to take things a little further and challenge myself. Our decision to use Github was also motivated by this desire.
Toward the end of the day, Jeff led the class in a “mini retrospective”. I got a chance to hearing most of my classmates’ reactions to the bootcamp so far. The process was a confirmation of my impressions: many of us are feeling like we’ve been totally thrown into the deep end with these first couple of projects, but also feel like we’re up for the challenge. Many also expressed being very impressed with the rest of the students. Everyone seems to be really intelligent, driven, personable, and fun to be around.
I had a great experience today. Although I was super tired (insomnia!), the hours just flew by. I can’t wait for tomorrow, when I’ll do it all again.