Reflection of First Week of WDI SF GA

Ok, first things first.  WDI SF GA is quite a long acronym, lets define terms:

WDI: Web Development Immersive

SF: San Francisco

GA: General Assembly

Wow, where to begin.  This has been a long busy packed but also fun week.  

The class has been great.  This week we met our teachers, learned about git, but mostly ruby, worked on practice programs, were introduced to OOP, had a guest speaker, and were introduced to coworking spaces.

The teachers and TA’s.  Man, I must tell you these people are smart.  Especially this one TA Erik (Github and Twitter handle : sferik) .  He went to CMU, and he contributes to several very busy OSS projects such as Thor and Multi-JSON rubygems.  Very impressive.  He’s rubbed shoulders with people such as Yehuda Katz of Rails and JQuery fame.  And not just that, he’s approachable, very friendly, and loves to teach.  Its just so darn impressive.  I’m just so thankful that he’s here as one of the TA’s to teach us.  What a treat!

Hum…other things: the guest speaker: Steven! Ragnarök (github handle: nuclearsandwich ) came in and spoke about working at Github.  Once again another smart person.  Lol, this guy knows how to customize his computer, everything from using Bash mods, to using sometype of modal window manager, and to using Arch 64 bit linux on his Lenovo ultrabook.  He can’t remember before he knew programming, and back in the day he used to try to contribute to the KDE project.  Impressive story man.  At the very end he gave us Octocat stickers of Github, their official mascot.  It was great to hear about the company, how they created their company and the culture there.

So the official HW assignment on Friday for this blog was as follows:

As part of the process of doing the WDI, we’d like you to think about the experience, and we are giving you the opportunity to blog about it. Please spend at least 30 minutes thinking about how the week went ‐ what worked, what didn’t, how you feel about it, and so on.

It would also be great for you to set up a blog on Tumblr and write about your experience there. This will be a fantastic thing to have at the end of the course and will chronicle your transformation into a web developer.

I’ll start working on answering that prompt now.  Its quite cool being surrounded by all these smart people thirsting to learn more about programming.  Each hungering to learn more for different reasons: some want to be programmers, some want to be better project managers and have more technical credibility, and yet some others will soon go to business school but are very much thinking about in the future having a tech startup.  I thought about this on Friday, when we were all working on three exercises for about 5 hours.  There comes a point 2-3 hours where I myself get exhausted mentally from programming and trying to find the solution, but just being in a room with 20+ other people also feeling the same thing but pressing on inspires and motivates me.  Its kind of cool, but the WDI in SF has the most people.  NY has about 12-15 and London has 9-12 people I think.  SF sure is the location to learn and latch onto these coding schools.

Thinking about the teachers I have, and the connections that they have, the guest speakers, the social events (oh yah, did I tell you that on Monday or at least I think it was Monday, I went to the Project Runway SF on tech and communities which was held in the EXACT same building as Twitter headquarters!!!).  These people are just so smart, so well connected, and they want us to learn.  I made the right choice to start this code school.  I’m so glad I am doing this.

One thing though I guess that is hard that is “what didn’t (work out)” as well is learning Object Oriented Programming.  Some topics might be given a cursory glance it seems.  Ex. begin exceptions rescue that later on when using them one doesn’t know where to start.  Also for OOP, it seems in my head that there are a bunch of classes, methods with def and end, and initialize this, and make an attribute accessor that, then class.new make an object instance, but its all jumbling.  Talking to one classmate Wooj says, “Don’t start tackling the process like that, thinking about what classes or methods I need. Rather work by breaking the problem down into steps.  Write a menu first, prompt first something, then write steps down for how to accomplish those things next needed on your list of problems you’ve broken down.” I’m going to try this as well as observe and analyze other peoples OOP code that either they’ve emailed, git gisted, or githubbed. I think that will help a lot.

Ok there goes for a hecka (yes, I’m from Norcal) long winded entry.  Thanks for reading peeps.  Take care.

JL