Week 5 at LEARN Academy
This is part 6 in a series about my experience at LEARN Academy coding bootcamp in San Diego, CA. You can read why I decided to go to bootcamp here, and also catch up with my thoughts on Week One, Week Two, Week Three and Week Four.
Week 5 – Ruby on Rails and introduction the the View and Controller part of MVC
This has been another great week at LEARN. I cannot emphasize enough how great of a decision it has been to take this journey. I’m really loving my time at LEARN, and my personal growth has been phenomenal. I love my fellow cohorts, instructors and the entire LEARN community.
This week we have taken our journey into the back end of the web. I’ve really appreciated the design of the curriculum this week. We began with an install and build of a simple Rails app. We poked around under the hood and explored the folders and files and got a sense of where things were. We also took some of our previous projects and imported them into Rails.
Day two had us building two more simple Rails apps, integrating forms, cookies and adding flash notices. Again we were able to call on our previous projects and incorporate them into the Rails apps.
On Wednesday we learned about workflows and generate. We built another Rails app that integrated previous projects. Each project built upon the previous one, and there was a good deal of repetition. I love the repetition because each time I repeat a task, I increase my understanding.
Thursday had us repeating Wednesday’s project, but we integrated BDD with Capybara and Rspec into the workflow. Testing is not everyone’s favorite thing, but I am really glad we are learning it. Slowing down and methodically planning what you want to your app to do and what the outcome should be really helps the learning process. BDD provides a road map, forces you to think through the task at hand, and when you make a mistake or forget something you are notified immediately. This give you the ability to troubleshoot problems each step of the way.
The final day of the week had us building yet another Rails app and integrating BDD into our workflow. This time the app added a little more difficulty, but again we built upon each of the previous days. Because we built so many small apps this week, Friday’s challenge was when the concept of MVC and my understanding of Rails really started to take hold.
We finished out the week with a reflective group meeting. It was great to come together and recognize our accomplishments. One of the most scary aspects of learning to code is the overwhelming amount of languages, libraries and frameworks out there. It is so easy to focus on what you don’t know and forget how far you have actually grown. We have grown to the point where we know what we are doing, but we also know there is so much out there to learn. Although it’s scary, it is also what makes me love coding so much. I love that I will always have something new to learn.
Ending the week with the talk really helped our cohort bond and grow into more of a family. We all have so much admiration and respect for each other. We are from different backgrounds but we all share our love of coding.
Unfortunately, I was plagued by a stomach bug this week so I wasn’t able to go out for lunches every day. I did re-visit Berkeley Pizza and La Creperie with some of my LEARN cohorts. The lone new lunch spot this week was Junz Teriyaki & BBQ for tofu teriyaki.
Up next week – The Model, SQL, Active Record and Full Stack Rails