MA Precourse Week 3

What was done

• More learning and practising ruby coding
• Finish of all the problems set in Chris Pines Learn to Program
• More code wars katas

What was learned

• How to work with tests
• Practising more Git and command line
• Understanding more about blocks, procs and lambdas (well not that much of this)
• Always check the tests first before doing the coding, I would end up using different names which would automatically fail the test otherwise.

Struggles

• Chapter 14 of Chris Pine. This was all about procs and blocks, which I have always struggled on, but after reading a few tutorials I feel semi confident.
• Make a better shuffle play list (last exercise in chapter 11). I just could not pass the tests, although I felt my code was good.
• Need to put issues have on github and get help from my cohort, instead of struggling. I am just spending lots of time on a problem which could be solved with some help. Although, I do believe that the struggle is also helpful, but I will need to get through so much work in the coming months that I need to prioritise my time.
• I had a persistent cough as a side effect of last week's flu. This stopped me from coming to Ace hotel, as I did not want to pass on my virus and disrupt every one. I am very considerate.

Other

• Set up a meeting to do some pair programming with my mentor on Monday
• On Friday, I attended the graduation ceremony for the seniors at Makers. It was great seeing all the  projects, and was impressed by the number of new technologies that they had to learn to get their applications working. Also good to meet and my cohort, and see how much fun and camaraderie between all the students and coaches. I am super excited to get starting full time, but also nervous with all the new stuff that I will have to learn. 
• Code wars rocks, not only for learning how to solve problems and practise syntax, but also in terms of friendly competition within my cohort (we have a leader board). Currently I am 3rd, although I had an unfair advantage as I did a lot of code wars before my interview at Makers to help me decide if I wanted to move into coding. I must say, code wars is probably the number one activity that has made me want to be a programmer. 

Blog struggles

• I think I will have to give up doing the whole music section, unless it is really straight forward. It is taking me too long to search for music with some relation to the ideas studied, so will stop putting music unless it is on the first few pages of YouTube search results.
• Same applies to images and gifs on Google search. Thus my blog is not going to be great to look at, but I will have images of my adventures in Makers which should make up for it.

MA Precourse Week 2

This week has been rubbish. Sunday evening I started to feel ill, and ended up with the flu. I have been stuck in bed for 3 days with very little work done.

What was done

• Learning about Ruby and solving problems with code
• Ruby kickstart Session 1 & 2
• Code wars

What was learned

• Basic ideas and implementation of ruby (ie strings, variables, methods, control flow, hashes, arrays, blocs etc) by going through Ruby Kickstart and doing the associated exercises.
• Never struggle for longer than 30 minutes
• If struggling, take a break and come back to it later or when inspiration strikes.

Struggles

• I have been sick with the flu for the whole week, so trying to code has been difficult. Glad that I did not manage to get behind and keep up with my peers.
• Seriously need a tidy, clean and orderly environment to be able to concentrate with coding.
• Doing katas (programming problems) with procs, blocks and lambdas. Still don't understand these ideas, but they are really useful so will need to spend more time reading up on them.

Success

• Managed to finish off all the problems set for this week, despite being ill. 
• Improve my code wars score. I am second in my cohort, but top place is over 60 points ahead so I doubt I will have time to overtake him. I know it is not a competition, but it is really cool trying to improve my record while trying different problems.

Other

• Our cohort was assigned mentors, mine is Jonny, and we spoke over slack. Very helpful guy and looking forward to working with him.
• Slack is brilliant, everyone is helping each other, learning new and different ways of solving problems. Everyone needs to get on this.

Need to do

• Get comfortable using regular expressions
• Meet up with the guys during the week
• Learn more about procs, blocks, and lambdas and do related katas on codewars
• Make a start on Ruby Koans and Ruby Monk 
• Meet my cohort and more people from MA at the graduation ceremony. I feel like I have known my cohort for ages (only just over 2 weeks) so should be great to meet most of the guys again. This event will be really exciting, as we will witness the final projects  being presented and will either be inspiring or nerve wrecking as this will be us in another 12 weeks!!!

Life goals

MA Precourse Week 1

What was learned

• Introductory material from MA
• Command line interface (CLI)
• GIT and GITHUB
• Working with others to learn from and help solve problems
• Improving problem solving in programming

Activities

• Communicating using Slack
• Work through command line tutorials (See links here) and Git tutorials (See links here)
• Setting up my computer with required software (Sublime Text, Ruby, Git etc)
• Went through Git immersion tutorial (still need to finish)
• Finished the challenges for Git and CLI
• Write up reflections for the week for the coaches at MA to help me with my learning (sort of like this blog)
• Pracitised my typing skills during the week
• Worked on some ruby kickstarter, code wars and Chris Pine
• Wrote flash cards for key commands for GIT and CLI (use Anki)
• Spent Thursday at Ace Hotel, Shoreditch with Gaby, Kevin, Tobenu and Patrick. Went through command line and Git immersion together. 
• Spent Friday at Forge, just across from the Ace Hotel. Although no one came by, I got loads done and using a table is far better than a sofa. 

Struggles

• I got stuck for ages on a couple of the questions on this weeks challenge on comand line, one I managed to solve (forgot speech marks, duh!) and the other was a unix problem (solved using nitrous command line). Big thanks to Adil!!!

Most of these commits were for one question!!!

• Really need to be more strict with my breaks. I just plough through and it is not great. I end up feeling really tired and straining my eyes.
• Got to level 14 on git immersion, and had to restart as I changed the .gitconfig in my folder instead of doing it for my profile...annoying, but at least I did not have to restart level 50!!
• When going to cafes or hotels to work in, need to do so early in the day, as the lighting is crap and really tires me out.
• Can be hard learning in public venues, lots of background noise which is distracting, need to bring some headphones and play some pink noise to drown it out. Click on the video below if you want to be bored...

Successes

• Finished most of this week's work early, so I got started on Chris Pine and Kickstarter.
• Working with some guys during the week was great, everyone was friendly and we all helped each other when stuck. Special shout out to Tobenna for looking after our stuff when going out for breaks.
• Good at switching to different topics to keep fresh (should stick to 30 minutes rule). For example, not doing one tutorial on command line all day, but doing something else.
• Avoiding spending all my time on one topic and mix up topics studied through the day (interleaving effect - good for learning)
• Keeping a log of what I need to do for each week and what needs to be completed.
• Helping guys on slack.

Other stuff

• Before the start of MA, I already started to play with Git and started to push some code to Github. This is the basic stuff, but there is so much more to Git than meets the eye (ie Git immersion).
• I have used command line before (not to the extent used in MA), the first computer I used was DOS based so everything was done on the command line, no windows and monochrome (yellow) colour.
• The pre course website is fantastic and is really helping me organise my activities for the week.
• Everyone is really helpful

Need to do:

• Pair program on ruby problems
• Memorise commands for tasks in CLI and GIT
• Stop using my mouse and use keyboard commands instead. Also use CLI to manipulate files and folders instead of "My Documents". 
• Read some books on ruby.
• Set a time limit for my work, so I can have regular breaks.
• Finish Git immersion course

Here are some more videos relating to this week's content (hard to find anything good that had some link to the GIT or CLI):

Bookmarks: GIT

Random list of bookmarks for Git and Github...hopefully will update this regularly and there is no order of preference (might do later)

After a couple of tutorials, most of the problems are best solved by using google and/or searching stackexchange for solutions.

Version control software and online version control

• https://github.com/ (online version, popular version)
• https://git-scm.com/downloads (local version)
• https://bitbucket.org (alternative version of github, with free 5 private repo)

Tutorials

• http://gitimmersion.com/
• https://githowto.com/ (similar to git immersion)
• https://git-scm.com/doc (official documentation)
• https://www.codecademy.com/en/courses/learn-git
• https://try.github.io/levels/1/challenges/1
• http://rogerdudler.github.io/git-guide/
• http://www.learnenough.com/git-tutorial
• http://www.tutorialspoint.com/git/
• https://guides.github.com/activities/hello-world/
• http://readwrite.com/2013/09/30/understanding-github-a-journey-for-beginners-part-1

Ideas: Command Line Interface (CLI)

During week 1 of pre course at Makers Academy, we were introduced to the command line via a terminal.

The command line is a really cool and efficient way of managing the computer resources. A great thing about the terminal, I believe, is that I can perform tasks without having to resort to the mouse (which is annoying and wastes time).

Here are list of things that I have done using CLI:

• Structure of a command line interface
• Finding the current path, moving between different directories
• Creating, moving, copying, deleting and listing files and directories (long and short form)
• Searching for files or directories with specific names
• Searching for files which contain specific text 
• Changing permissions of files and directories
• Viewing contents of files 
• Adding to a file's contents
• Using some basic functions ie date, listing processes running, word count, 
• Opening programs, or open a file with a specific program
• Stopping a process that is running
• Getting help for any method used in the CLI
• Adding command to a file (ie ruby script) that runs the file without having to write out the full command
• Changing terminal environment (paths and variables) for one time or permanent 
• Using a terminal text editor (not really a fan)
• Using a combination of the above and adding flags to get more options for each command

This list for me acts a sort of revision aid, that is why I have not added the commands. Reading this and being able to recall or do the actions above without help shows me that I have learned this stuff.

Here are some links to the ideas studied here

Page of links

NOTE: This list is not exhaustive, I am sure there are loads of commands and actions that I could do through the terminal. 

Bookmarks Part: Command Line

Random list of bookmarks for Command Line Interface (CLI)...hopefully will update this regularly and there is no order of preference (might do later)

• http://lifehacker.com/5990668/master-the-command-line-this-weekend
• https://www.codecademy.com/en/courses/learn-the-command-line
• http://cli.learncodethehardway.org/book/
• http://www.learnenough.com/command-line-tutorial
• http://linuxcommand.org/learning_the_shell.php
• http://www.davidbaumgold.com/tutorials/command-line/
• http://ryanstutorials.net/linuxtutorial/

MA Pre Course Day 1

Monday was the official start day of the pre course for the February 2016 cohort!!!

In a nutshell, it was just a get together of the members of the cohort getting to know each other and what to expect during the next four weeks.

Highlights:

• Name game and introducing our partners after talking for 5 minutes to the rest of the group
• We all had a laugh when trying to communicate with the rest of the cohort online.
• It was a quick affair and went to the local bar to socialise with everyone.
• Everyone was really cool and friendly, even had a chat with a couple of senior guys who were imparting their wisdom.

As this was the first day, I have done the following:

• Worked on a couple of tutorials for the command line interface (CLI)
• Practised my shortcuts for Sublime Text
• Practised typing
• Uploaded some code to Github
• Read some blogs of MA students

Aims:

• Meet up with some of the guys to do some pair programming and learn off each other
• Get into a daily routine, get as much work done, exercise, meditate, sleep, regular breaks from the computer screen, etc.

Here are the anthems of the day (do not know how long I will do these music interludes):

First day of Pre course!!!

Well today is the beginning of a new chapter in the book of my life. I will be meeting my fellow students who will be embarking upon this journey to code nirvana. It is only a meeting, but like any first day, nerves are there. It will be fine, I have been practising my greetings and cheesy smiles in front of a mirror before bed last night. Should be good to meet everyone  and finally get started on the course.

To occupy my brain before the course starts, I will be bashing my way through some command line interface work (there is coding joke in there).