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