Reflections on the sixth week of the Makers course
Another tough week, this time not helped by the Bank Holiday: while it gave me an extra day to work on the weekend challenge, it meant one less day in a very important transition week: yes, this was the week we moved onto JavaScript.
Despite the extra day, I was unable to finish the weekend challenge by Tuesday morning. I was also disappointed with my code and wished I’d spent more time planning (it was a Ruby program to input and calculate bowling scores, a surprisingly fiendish challenge). My pair partner for the day raised some good points about my code in the start-of-week code review, and then John, our coach for the week, introduced us to JavaScript with an enormous amount of information. We then had a bit of time to ourselves to take stock, and then I had a much-needed slow and steady afternoon with my pair partner working through the start of the week’s challenge. This included a return to FizzBuzz, this time in JavaScript. We also had a good chat about how we were finding the course, and — as usual — it was reassuring to share experiences.
Wednesday was good during the daytime: a fun debugging workshop, even though JavaScript still seems elusive and rather tricky compared to Ruby ( I worked through most of the Codecademy introductory JavaScript course a few months ago, but I’ve fallen out of practice — and, in any case, we’re learning much higher level concepts on the Makers course). After lunch, Dana discussed DISC personality types with us and, as part of this, we were encouraged to reflect on our group work from last week, which was illuminating. I then had a solid few hours of consolidation with a new pair partner, working through FizzBuzz again. The JavaScript syntax is starting to sink in…
On Wednesday night I made the mistake of deviating from my rule of not coding after 6pm. I picked up my Ruby bowling program and tried to fix it. I also spent a lot of Thursday morning working on it instead of learning JavaScript. Yes, I got it working but my code was ugly and unwieldy. I had a bit of a chat to John, our coach for the week, on Slack — he told me not to worry any more about the weekend challenge, but I was worried: am I being too much of a perfectionist? Am I not really grasping some of the core concepts? Had I wasted a precious morning of the curtailed week? To try and catch up, I went through the Makers walkthrough of how to translate the Ruby Airport weekend challenge (from week one) into JavaScript.
I’ve noticed a pattern that sometimes I can get quite frustrated or overwhelmed in the mornings at Makers, when I’m left to my own devices and take stock of the vast number of concepts and resources that I have not yet managed to digest. However, the afternoon — pairing time — is typically another story, and I generally feel uplifted and much more confident by the end of them, and I am really grateful to my pair partners not just for helping me learn to code, but also for restoring my spirits. On Thursday afternoon, I was in definite need of a lift — as was my pair partner, who sounded like they were in the same boat as me in terms of general mood. Together we put in a really good shift, working through a couple of JavaScript katas on Codewars to start, followed by a quick look at the Airport challenge. The bulk of the afternoon was spent working on a thermostat app: it doesn’t sound very exciting, but we really enjoyed it, getting to grips with both JavaScript and the Jasmine testing framework. Later on, I broke my ‘evening coding’ embargo again, but this time to hook up the thermostat program to an HTML page via a JavaScript interface. When I got it working, it was another of those ‘wow, look at this cool thing’ moments that studying at Makers periodically throws up. I’d almost forgotten about the bowling program travesty…
On Friday morning we had a very heavy, but interesting, workshop on JavaScript control flow, event loops, and asynchronous programming. Afterwards I pottered around for a bit, and got a bit wound up over encapsulation, which seems to be very difficult with JavaScript classes. I knew that I’d have to rewrite the bowling program in JavaScript for the upcoming weekend challenge, and knew that encapsulation was going to be involved. In the end-of-week retro John provided reassurance: we should be aware of encapsulation, but not to tie ourselves in knots with it (like I had been doing). His advice was to concentrate on code that works and on writing classes and methods with clear responsibilities. We’re encouraged to share how we’ve been feeling in the retro, and I possibly over-shared my worries from the past week, though I felt better for getting it off my chest. Still, I felt a lot more cheerful by the end of it — I am perhaps setting too high an expectation of what I should be able to do by week six of a coding bootcamp, and should probably spend more time reflecting on what I can do now that I couldn’t before.
In the evening, to round off the week, I was once again thinking about bowling and managed to get the frame class logic modelled, tested and working. Over the weekend, the challenge progressed more smoothly, thanks in large part to planning the logic for the frames and score classes in advance. I stayed up quite late on Sunday (and got up early Monday to apply the finishing touches), but I had working code and was able to link my code to a simple HTML page that updated via a JavaScript interface — this was definitely something I couldn’t do before, even if there’s still plenty more to learn about dynamic webpages.
In sum, the rollercoaster continues — it was a difficult week, with the day lost to the Bank Holiday, but — in recognising the behaviours and obstacles that limit my learning, I’m also on the path to a healthier and more productive mindset.
