Week 4 was forewarned. At the start of the course we were told students tend to find this week the hardest and most heavy going. Bizarrely, given I’ve struggled a lot so far, I didn’t find this week too tricky. To date, my hardest week has probably been week 6.
But I digress. Let’s jump right in and reflect on database week!
This week was all about the web. In weeks 1 and 2 (and the entirety of the pre-course) we’d been off the web, running our Ruby programs via the command line.
All very cool, but not very “real world” in the sense that most people barely know what the command line is let alone use it to run apps. Therefore, this week was our first step in turning our Ruby and TDD knowledge into working web apps we could publish and show off to friends and family.
So without further ado… welcome to the web! Continue reading “Week 3 – Welcome to the Web!”
This week was a continuation and consolidation of the OOP, ODD, Ruby and TDD topics covered in week 1.
The weekly challenge was Oystercards: a TDD Ruby sim of London’s Oystercard system. The weekend challenge was to create a very basic takeaway ordering system that sent a confirmation text message using Twilio. Again, this was done with TDD Ruby.
Continue reading “Week 2 – More OOP, class extraction and dependency injection”
This week was the first week of the main course. It was all about object oriented programming (“OOP“) in Ruby, more Test Driven Development (“TDD“) using RSpec and pair programming (see also this post on the basic TDD and pair programming exercise we did during week 4 of the pre-course).
This week was also an introduction to the typical structure of a week at Makers Academy. A typical week has a weekly challenge and a weekend challenge.
But first, let’s dive in and reflect on this week’s big idea: object oriented programming.
Today was my first day of the main course at Makers Academy. For the nervous ones (myself included) it was a day full of ice breakers so no stress!
Hard to believe given my lengthy posts, but this is a short one. Tonight’s the night before the start of the main course. A lot of students refer to it as Makers Eve. Why? It was like Christmas eve – I couldn’t sleep! Continue reading “Makers-eve: the day before day 1!”
This was the fourth and final week of the pre-course. To round off our learning the focus this week was pair programming and test driven development (“TDD“).
Continue reading “Pre-Course: Week 4 – TDD and Pair Programming”
This is a short and sweet video of David Bowie explaining authenticity and risk taking. Although he’s talking about art, I think the sentiments apply equally to all aspects of life, whether it’s changing careers, trying something new, setting yourself a challenge or, as is the case with me quitting the law to learn how to code, all three! Continue reading “Bowie: risk taking and authenticity”
Week 3 is all about… even more Ruby! Week 3 builds on week 2: more Ruby challenges and scoring even more points on Codewars.
