Monday
- First day, and it was very easy and relaxed. Only a little bit of coding.
- Name game. Too long
- Free breakfast and talk with others
- Social after
- paper challenge with Junyan
- Talk with Dana and Jordan about how to cope with course
Tuesday
- Had a short introduction about the structure of the course
- Started working with my pair partner Patrick
- Worked through the first challenge, creating Boris Bikes, implementing object oriented programming (via Ruby) and Test Driven Development (via Rspec).
Wednesday
- First stand up in our group with Roi, discussing our wins and struggles from yesterday, and our plans for today.
- Worked with Kevin, who has a great blog here, decided to start the weekly challenge from scratch due to issues with git and wanting to cement the basics.
- Joined the meditation group, and did some mindfulness exercises.
Thursday
- Worked with Harsheet, continued from question 16 out of 22 and used his code as a starting point.
- Played Ping Pong, and got beat twice. Revenge is on the agenda!!
Friday
- Worked with Pete, continued from Q20 till the end (see here for my code)
- After 5 received free drinks and partied with the rest of Makers till midnight.
Weekend
- Worked on Airport Challenge
- Went over the Boris Bikes Challenge alone, to cement the work.
What I learned?
- Big Breakthrough 1: Hammering home that everything in ruby is an object, and ruby syntax is useful but stops the user from seeing this.
- Big Breakthrough 2: Using mocks in tests, to avoid creating objects from other classes, to help create outputs to help test specific methods.
- Big Breakthrough 3: Understanding the idea of Behaviour Driven Development, as an overarching methodology to produce software. It really helped see the forest from the trees (implementation and unit tests)
Challenges and struggles?
- Struggling with turning user stories into features and feature tests
- Doing TDD, instead of just normally doing the code first.
- Feeling dumb and coping with this
- Working with someone who knew more than I, and feeling like I was not contributing
- Getting used to working with a Mac. It is the first time I am using one, so I am a bit slow compared to using a unix/windows laptop.
- Trying to write this blog. It is very hard to find time to write this blog and deal with the course and life. I think I was ambitious in doing it this way, so I will need to do it in a different format.
Success?
- Finishing off the challenge before the end of the week, despite starting again
- Using someone elses code base to work from
- Finishing off the weekend challenge, despite restarting three times
- Doing meditation twice during the week
- Working well with my pair partners, and learning lots from each of them
- Still writing this blog
- Walking to office and home, 5 times during the week
- Bringing packed lunch (warm meals with my thermos) everyday, and avoiding eating out and saving money
- Walked over 10,000 steps twice during the week.
Other
- Party on Friday at Makers was great, a great time to really relax and socialise.
- Going to football next week
- Spending time with cool, interesting, fun smart and driven people. Nikesh was right, I have found like minded people who I feel I will be friends for a long (whether they will be with me another matter :-( )
- Really happy with my choice to attend this course, it is really draining and lots to take in. Yet by the end of the weekend I felt that I grasped a lot of new ideas and was able to understand a lot.
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