MA Precourse Week 4

What was done

• Practised more ruby through completing code wars' katas (not as much as the previous weeks).
• Met my mentor and did pair programming together.
• Completed the fizzbuzz kata in ruby using a rspec as the testing framework.
• Pair programmed with some of my fellow cohorts.

What was learned

• Learned about "Test Driven Development" (TDD for short).
• Learned and practised some basic rspec (TDD framework for Ruby) on some basic katas.
• Learned the basic structure of rspec tests for methods. 
• Learned about regular expressions.

Struggles

• When pairing and knowing what was already being explained, but not wanting to sound arrogant. 
• Pairing in general, very weird not to do my own thing. Although when doing it with Patrick, I just turned my computer off, so we could work together and not be distracted.
• Writing tests firsts instead of figuring out the method then coding and testing if it works (this is how I approach code wars katas). 
• Setting up the files, directories, accessing the lib files in rspec.
• Pairing with Patrick, spent ages on this kata, and two other guys (Tobenna and Paul) both managed to finish it before us and with less code. Despite this, I still felt it was a great learning experience having to explain my ideas and solve problems as a pair.
• Struggled with using look arounds in regular expressions.

Successes

• Getting more confident with using regular expressions. I managed to do a quite a few katas on code wars using regex, and I am very happy. I am not perfect, and there are aspects (ie look ahead and look back) which I struggle on. I have got some resources to help me with so I am happy. 
• Doing some pairing, and not ending up spooning each other (see video below) 

Other

It was him shooting at me at Makers

• Met my mentor, Jonny, at Makers and spent a couple of hours going through the fizzbuzz rspec pairing tutorial. Jonny was great, and really helpful, he spent so much extra time going through some key ideas on rspec and classes. I feel lucky to have him as a mentor. 
• While pairing with my mentor, someone decided to rain down on us nerf bullets. Which was a bit of a shock, but all in good fun.
• Last week of Pre course, and it was a very easy and relaxing week, no weekend challenge (well it was catch up, which meant no work for me as I did everything on time due to not working).
• Finally going to start, on Monday 29th February, and I am excited and nervous. But not as much as when I started pre course, I have met and worked with a bunch great guys from my cohort at the Ace Hotel, and the chat, via slack, conversations have been fun and helpful. So I can not wait to start working with them.
• Went to Ace on Tuesday, and we had almost 10 people come in and work. It was great, we had a laugh, helped each other, encouraged each other. Who would have thought coding would be so social. 
• I have finally been given the code to the Makers office, so no more going through the intercom. I finally feel I a student at Makers.