Dev Bootcamp Day 16 (Phase 2, Day 1)

Throughout the morning, we didn't do any coding as is with the first day of any phase.  We started off welcoming the new cohort. It's odd being on the other end of everything.  The ice breakers were odd again. This time I ended up with people not in my cohort. I tried to match up with someone from the new cohort but that only happened 1 in 4 times. I ended up with a TA one of the times.  

When Phase 1 went in to have some Phase 1 stuff, Phase 3 taught the new Phase 2 9 topics. That made a lot less scared. I was so overwhelmed based on the prep work but that made me feel better.  

The topics that I remember are HTML, CSS, AJAX, jQuery, CRUD, ActiveRecord, Git, and debugging.  Some of those were even grouped together so I actually remembered less than 1/3 of the topics.  I had to sit down twice. I was ready to pass out. I think standing normally isn't so bad but standing right after I eat causes me more problems.  I was able to stand for 15 minutes before having to sit. I sat for a little under 5 minutes and then I was able to stand for 10 minutes. But then I really had to sit again. Sitting for 5 minutes helped and then I was able to stand again for the rest of the stations. 

Once that was done, we had to teach Phase 1 topics.  That was mostly fun. It was good to explain and answer questions. We also didn't teach alone so there wasn't as much pressure that perhaps someone would ask something I didn't know.  There were 9 boards but we were short on time so we only did 8 of them.  Then it was lunch time. By the time I got to the food, choices were lacking. I did get a tuna which was good because that was the only one left that I was able to eat. I didn't get lightheaded at all teaching. Perhaps the adrenaline of teaching helped. 

At 2 PM we had an hour long lecture. That was a little bit rough. I was so tired. I believe most people were so tired. I went and got a snack to much on while listening.   We covered so many files and so many things that it was so hard to follow. 

I do really like with Phase 2 that there is a schedule so you know what you will do and when.  I also like that the instructor, Anne, uses Screenflow so we can view the lectures later. I just have to figure out where they will be. 

Based on the schedule we won't have any time during 9-6 to work on our portfolio challenges except when we set up our 1 on 1 sessions with the TAs/Instructors. Those sessions last 30 minutes. Based on how many challenges there are, they recommend doing 4 the first week, 4 the second week, and 2 the third week. They are all due by Tuesday at midnight the second week. 

We had 2 core assignments plus 1 stretch assignment for the day.  We only started coding at 3 PM so I thought that was a lot. 

We were not making ruby code and running it in terminal; we were taking a base repository that had a lot of things done for us and then making a few updates so that a previous program we created was displayed in a website. 

The second program was an anagram server. We had a dictionary of more than 25,000 words. Then in the website, a user would give a word. The output would show that word plus all anagrams of that word.  My pair and I thought this through. We didn't just want to compare each and every word in the dictionary to the given word because that would take forever.   Next we thought of taking the length of the word and only comparing it to words in the dictionary of that length.  To compare the words we were sorting the letters via an array.  We thought this might still be too long.  Then we decided to update our schema to have the word and then the word sorted alphabetically then each time, we didn't have to sort the letters since they were already in the table. While working through this all we were noticing other groups finishing up and couldn't believe it. Then later we get to Anagrams 2 where we were supposed to speed up our first problem.  Well we thought in advance how it would be slow so we finished problem 2 before even realizing it was a problem.   I felt like we had a real win there.  Instead of being far from completing our assignments we were done at 6:53. I knew I could rush to the train station walking and make the 7:30 train so that's what I did. I made the train by less than 5 minutes and I rushed walking. I think the bus would have been longer because of waiting for it and traffic.  It's always super nice to be able to take the 7:30 train versus the 8:40 train at least once a week. 

My usb internet thing wouldn't work at all on the train again. It works less than half the time. I was going to try to start the first portfolio challenge but I needed to read the assignment and get the base files so I couldn't. So instead of working I typed this blog post and ate cheez itz. I did bite my cheek numerous times!

I got off the train to discover my bike head light had been stolen. That was a scary bike ride home.  Then I got home and was going to shower, eat dinner, then code. Instead I showered and rested then climbed into bed.  Even with that I won't get 8 hours of sleep.