One Month In

So I’ve got basically one month completed in the Flatiron School Software Engineering Online Full-time program. I’m heading into my first project week which will require creating a CLI app using Ruby to scrape data from a website and do something with it. So far the course has covered basic Ruby procedures (variables, logic, looping methods, iteration), Ruby data structures (arrays, hashes), enumerating methods for those data structures (.each, .map etc.), Object Oriented programming (Classes, instances, object relationships), Object architecture, and scraping.

Looking back over the past month I would definitely say that I’m glad I have a decent amount of prior experience with coding. I imagine it is much easier to focus on the details of the lessons without having to also wrap my brain around the larger ideas over all in such a short amount of time. I’m sure anyone who had 100% or even 75% of their time available to dedicate to the course would be fine, but given that I happened to start a new job in the same week as the bootcamp launch, I would’ve been quite overwhelmed staring from scratch with 2 40hr per week commitments. That said, basically 100% of my free time has been dedicated to the curriculum.

My main goal moving forward is to do more of this, writing blog posts. I have a tendency to work until I’m too tired to actually retain information or solve problems. Things that seem impossible to figure out at the end of a night often magically seem incredibly simple the next morning after some sleep and some coffee. My main issue is that I HATE leaving a lab unfinished. Perhaps I should stop and write about it when I get stuck like the prompt on the learn.co dashboard page suggests?