Dev Bootcamp Day 2

Day 2

Short Version:

Travel sucked in so many ways.

DBC Class flew by and was pretty awesome. 

Travel home sucked at first but got better.

Long Version:

I woke up at 6 without my alarm. I didn't get up. My alarm went off at 6:05 so I was ready. I hit snooze. My second alarm went off at 6:09.  I was out of bed by 6:09.  Little Poly slept cuddled up to my side the entire night. I don't think either of us moved from when we fell asleep. 

I got up, got dressed, then tried to figure out what to make for lunch and have for breakfast.  I took a big container of grapes. Figured that could be breakfast and lunch. Plus I made a peanut butter sandwich. I almost made 2 but was stressed I'd be late. 

I think I left the house right at 6:30 but I can't remember exactly. My Strava should tell me so if I wasn't on a train now I could check.   I decided biking is hard and there must be a slight hill on the way to the train station.

I get to the train station and have so much trouble with my bike lock. I can never manage to unlock it even with the key.  Once I figured that out, I went over to tag on for the train and I get all these errors. I have since learned you only tag on and off the first time of the month. (But then it wouldn't work on the bus either. )  I was super stressed the entire train ride about how my pass would work to get the rest of the way to DBC and getting home.  

I just missed the bus 30 so I had to wait about 10 minutes for the next one.  I still got to DBC at 8:20. I think 3 people were there first.   I looked up the muni pass and tried to call them and stuff. So I didn't get to do extra prep then either.  

Everyone else started filtering in near 8:30 and talking to me and asking how my commute was and stuff. I guess I complain a lot about my commute because everyone knows how I live far.  

Then actual DBC was fun. It flew by. The least fun was when we had to work solo on a problem that we actually already did in the prep work. And that I looked at many answers before so not sure if I was just using those or thinking on my own. 

We did pair programming but with the same partner all day.  I think we did pretty well until we got to this one part of a problem where we had to convert from a number to spelled out words. What was so awful about that was that we both did the same exact problem before in the prep work and we still struggled for far too long. Most in the class struggled with that part too so I shouldn't feel so bad but boy do I.   Near 5:50 we were finishing that up and about to start the next problem but we both decided we needed a breather or we would struggle with the next problem no matter what it was. 

Tonight was mentor night so we had free pizza and a few mentors came. They told us about the mentoring program.  They match each interested student with a mentor in the coding industry. This mentor is interested in being our mentor and meeting with us but is very busy so once we are paired we need to be persistent. Here's what I want to know…. how am I going to have the time to fit in meeting with a mentor once a week.  We don't have to sign up for a mentor if we don't want to but I mean we should and it'd be good.

Once the mentor festivities were over I started coding another program. It was a requirement for the day but supposed to be done in pairs. I didn't want to meet back up with someone because I'd have to leave early. 

I took notes at the different sessions we had today.  Our first session was on readable code.  Then we had an Engineer Empathy session.  In the afternoon we went over Regular Expressions. 

We will have engineering empathy sessions weekly. This time we talked about how to solicit feedback, how to give feedback, how to ask for feedback, and how to integrate feedback. We are supposed to become feedback ninjas. 

One of the coding exercises where we had to convert words to pig latin I thought was very similar to an exercise we did for prep but my partner couldn't remember it. Then I figured it out that it was on my App Academy work for the interview process.   I opened my old code after we were done and think some of that was better. Some of the new one was better.  But per our directions this time if it started with a vowel you just repeated the word instead of having to modify it. Also we weren't given specific instructions with "qu". So those 2 things were easier.

The hardest exercise for the day was also the easiest. But it stressed me out more since you can't "check" your answer. It was typing up pseudocode for a problem. They gave you the code and you had to type the pseudocode for it. 

I ended up being so close to finishing but not then fixing things that I left 5 minutes late. Then I thought I would take bus 10 that I saw on google at one point since it was 15 minutes by bus versus 20ish.  Well I headed that way and had Dave tell me where it was and stuff and he discovered it stopped at 7:30 PM. So I was screwed and left late. So then I backtracked to a hotel and found a taxi. I made it to the train station with about 5 minutes to spare. Which was far too close for my liking.  But once on the train I can relax. And Dave is meeting me at the train station so we can bike home together.

I typed that on the train. I got home a little after 10. I got new clothes in the mail and had to try them on. That wasted a lot of time. Then I coded until close to midnight.