"It really works!"

1:18-1:33: That's the kind of euphoria I get every now and then these days. Celebrating small victories is important, as is keeping your spirits up and your perspectives intact.



You see, I've been spent the last two weeks coding, coding and coding, and the next 10 will most likely be the same.




It's strange that I have a routine now: Get up at 7 in the morning (super early by my standards). Walk and keep switching buses and trains and getting crushed during an hour-long commute (London Bridge is falling down f'ing nuts!). SCRUM at 9, then class until 5/5:30. Stay at the coworking space for homework until 9ish. Make and eat a simple dinner when I get home around 10. Shower and blow-dry my hair (another simple-but-really-odd thing to me that's now a necessity because I can't just hop in the shower in the morning anymore), then more work on the homework if needed. None of this is what I'm used to, but hey, if it's a change that I'm after, I'm certainly getting it.



So 6,000 miles, 50+ hours of pre-work, and about 120+ hours of class and homework later, what have I learned?



WEEK 1



Roles and processes in software development (waterfall vs. agile, SCRUM, extreme programming) / Unix basics / Project management with Trello / Version control with Git and Github / Programmer traits, Sublime Text, useful stuff in general / Introduction to Ruby: basics, conditionals, methods, debugging, arrays, hashes, symbols, enumerables, object-oriented programming, inheritance, modules, mix-ins, APIs



Most of the above were in the first four days too as Fridays are meant to be pretty light and dedicated more to a weekly review. We built quite a few apps: lots of calculators (basic, BMI, mortgage, fuel efficiency), some random-group generator, a subway journey planner type thing, an animal-shelter manager (this was hard), and a stock-brokering tool (this was really hard).



Our instructors kept telling us that the first few weeks would be tough ("We're basically forcing your heads under the water") and that it's normal to not get everything yet. Sure, this stuff isn't rocket science, but it's not exactly easy either, and I think I did pretty okay and understood a fair amount.



This is akin to learning a new language, I suppose. You can (feel as if you) have no problem with the grammar and vocabulary you're being taught, but when you're asked to speak or write something, you can still struggle to put things together, know when to use what, etc. This nerd will get there eventually, for sure. Language and logic: what's not to like?



WEEK 2 (THIS PAST WEEK)



Files / Exceptions / Databases (PostgreSQL) / Advanced blocks in Ruby / HTML / CSS / OSI model / Sinatra



Wow, things got better fast (um, I hope I haven't jinxed myself). I am happy to report that, by the end of this week, the last two projects from week 1 were still the only ones that I really struggled with. That means eight out of 10 were fine, and that's hardly a disaster even by my standards (but let's do better, still).



After Ruby and SQL, and especially as I've caught the bug that's been making the rounds in class, it was a welcome relief to get to the front-end stuff, which I'm more familiar with and which I think is easier.



I offered myself comic relief whenever I could as well: when generating dummy data, my users were named Esteban Colberto and Bob Barley, and my store sold things like haterade and awesome sauce. Then for an assignment where we're to code a fashion website's home page based on a mock-up given, I decided to write satirical copy for it instead of sticking with lorem ipsum or bacon ipsum. This nerd was happy, I tell ya. Happy.



And soon even happier! When we got to Sinatra, that's when that "things are coming together now" feeling hit. It's great to be able to use everything we've learned so far in one place. We've been working on movie database, revisiting code, refactoring, rebuilding with object-oriented programming and doing more with databases as we go along. Things do make more sense with more context and, of course, more time and more practice.



Oh, and on top of the usual Friday drinks, we also went on our first field trip this week to Facebook's London office:



All in all, a great week. And it's still true what I said about a month ago: Almost everything has been better for me this year than in 2009-2012.
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