Day One Makers Academy - And We're Live!

So yeah I know I blogged yesterday but here's the thing...

I said I'd blog every Monday, and its Monday, so I'm blogging. Makes sense? Ok.

Yeah but in all seriousness I did it as more of a milestone celebratory blog because I had finished the 4 week pre-course. Another reason was to give a more detailed insight to potential applicants that are thinking about applying.



But yeah, Monday! Mondays mainly because I expect that we will be given weekend challenges so in theory I can have a bit of extra time to blog and reflect.

So day 1 was everything I expected and more...

REAL HUMAN INTERACTION

The night before I would say I was caught in an infinite loop which ultimately crashed my computer. This where the computer is me trying to sleep and the loop is me knowing I need to sleep, but that that anxiety of knowing this is making my me unable to sleep.

Its cool I got there in the end. I got a solid 3 hours wooo!

This first week I will be commuting from my magic land of roundabouts called Milton Keynes to London. FYI I am very good at driving around roundabouts btw. The journey takes around 90 mins from the station give or take.

I wanna know how much cheaper it will be to commute and go to work like a normal person, but also see how exhausting it will be. I have a place to stay in London for the 2nd week so it will be interesting to compare.

Just a word about English weather. As an ex poker player, it is to my shame that the English weather is actually an amazing bluffer. When I think its cold, freaking crazy heat! Oh, the sun is out? Cool, just T-shirt needed, and of course a bloody monsoon tears down! It doesn't help that in UK its not really financially worth it for places to have A/C everywhere, so its actually hotter than in Asia in some ways. Either way, you got me again you bastard... as I had extra weight in my bag of my jumper and coat!

Meeting the cohort dudes was awesome. Everyone is in the same process orientated mindset which makes it an amazing environment for learning. It was great to see familiar faces from the meets, and the new faces as well.

I have been trying to get onto a course like this for a few months now,  and I'm relieved that its started. Less coding by myself everyday and more collaboration and like interacting with real human beings!

One thing that really stood out to me was not just our amazingly casual and funny teacher, but also the depth of the course. It wasn't just about coding, but also had things for our mind and body wellbeing. Maybe the only job titled "Chief Joy Officer" in the UK, Dana is there to look after students wellbeing and teach emotional intelligence.

Yoga is happening every other  day and medition is daily. My Britishness automatically makes me wanna bail out, but fuck it I'm all in, and I ain't going back.

This is course for the long term. We're not just improving the technical, but our minds, our bodies, and giving us a process to maintain it afterwards too. Help us learn to help ourselves. It was very inspiring. Makers doesn't have this kind of reputation for nothing.

But that is just Day 1!!

TDD IS VERY TESTING

The last week of the pre-course brought in something that really threw me aback. 

There I was pretty happy with my learning so far and then suddenly out of nowhere it seems this entirely different foreign thing invades my confidence like a million dollar battle scene in Game of Thrones.

Test Driven Development is something that is used to test out if your program is working or not. It is written by the developers themselves most of the time to give some structure to building their program systematically. I have never heard of this before, maybe it was because I was, and am so focused on the making.

In complete timing coincidence, I'll let Tom Scott talk about fizzbuzz in his freshly newly released video;

We made our fizzbuzz code;

But we're still noob so we're gonna still use our repetitive code for now...

Then we use something called RSpec to test our Ruby code;

So here we wrote 4 tests, if we enter 3 (fizz), 5 (buzz), 15 (fizzbuzz) or 4 (don't change anything).

Hopefully this isn't wrong lol. So what's wrong with this?

Well, its all so foreign. So far I don't think we've used "describe" or "do" or "expect" or the method ".to eq", of which that isn't underscored like "to_s"(convert to a string) above. On top of that, there is do/end which is the same structure as a loop, but it only runs once? I try to avoid using do/end loops because I find I end up getting confused about where/how many "ends" there are/go.

But the struggle is all part of the process I guess. It will all come in due time. After all, this is one of the main reasons why I want to do the course, it is guiding me in the right directions needed. Learning by myself, I wonder how long it would have been before I knew what TDD was?

Ok, I've written War and Peace again. Time to sleep. Til next week...