Week 3 of theFirehoseProject has been easy, difficult, informative, frustrating, and a ton of more emotions in between. The week hasn’t been imparticularly that difficult and I have managed to get a lot done. Nomster is officially done and I’m pretty psyched with where I am at in my progression of the course. 3 weeks completed and 2 apps already done.
On top of finishing up Nomster I’ve been working on our Quiz assignments and I’m starting to build out my website that I have been putting off for months now and implementing some database and form structure into the site. I’m not super pleased with the look but that’s just doing some CSS and I’m trying to flesh out an idea on the fly. Hindsight, I probably should take some time to actually wireframe what I want but being green to this whole world it’s proving difficult to flesh out all your ideas when you don’t know best practices.
The good part about doing the Quiz assignments, as well as doing the self directed lessons in the course work, is that you can really apply your knowledge that you have been learning, no real safety nets. Obviously you can reference course material and past experiences, which in reality is what experience really is is just a collection of past references and activities, but for the most part you are on your own. Taking the time to determine where you need to go next and following the steps of specific gems. configuring models, controllers, etc are all part of the day to day stuff we will need to be doing as devs so these self-directed assignments are brilliant to really solidify your skill set.
It’s been both fun and frustrating to play without a safety net, it really develops confidence in your knowledge and also humbles you to where you really are in your development as a developer. Nothing though is as humbling as tackling raw ruby challenges, not easy. Rails, for me, has been pretty easy to grasp and you can use what you know to extrapolate your next step but dealing with raw ruby challenges the extrapolation process isn’t as easy as rails. I’ve been trying to do more and more ruby challenges so that I can better grasp the fundamentals of the programming language so that I can make my life easier when I work with rails. Considering rails is the framework knowing the foundation is an excellent way to fully understand the framework and just how much work it would be to try and build a web app from just Ruby (thanks DHH for building rails).
With the handful of ruby challenges that I have completed on codewars I have been working on understanding arrays and more accurately 2D arrays or multidimensional arrays, sounds daunting and intimidating; it is. My mentor thinking that the best way for me to grasp Ruby he assigned me to a task that I could use to understand theFirehoseProject final project, a chess game. My task for this week was to build a chessboard class, build a new board, take user input to place a piece on a specific location, place that piece, take more user input to move the placed piece to a new location in the array. It’s not easy, at least for me. I spent nearly 3 hours and it finally clicked and my piece moved! What this has taught me is a solid grasp of indexing an array as well as indexing a multidimensional array then manipulating that multidimensional array to pass in other values. This has been both a frustrating and rewarding task of which I actually enjoyed. Riding a good high right now.
Week 3 has been busy and very much rewarding. There’s been ups and downs that have payed off and will continue to pay off in the long run. I’m really starting to feel like I’m getting my ruby legs, where things weeks ago made zero to little sense things are now starting to move from little sense to mostly solid foundation at this rate I should be a pretty solid web dev by the end of the bootcamp and I’m extremely excited to see where I will be in 12 more weeks. Jeez, it’s even crazy now to think how far I’ve come in 3 weeks let alone where I will be after 15 weeks. Another good week in the bag and some solid growth of knowledge, overall a success!