A little over a week until it all starts!

Hey everyone,

Just thought I'd check in with the people that are following me. I'm exactly 11 days before the start of the bootcamp and I am extremely excited to get things on the road.

After doing a bunch of tutorials I decided to start building something of my own. I created a little game that's not yet ready for production but everything is fully functional. I just need to create more levels for the game. It's primarily done in javascript(jquery). I'm extremely surprised at all the things that jquery can do and what it cannot do unless you tell it to do so.

For example, I probably spent a good two hours trying to figure out how I can have the program wait until a certain animation is done. I then figured out that you can use a callback, which is simply a function that runs after the function that's nesting it is finished executing. I learned about callbacks in at least two tutorials, but I never really understood exactly how to implement it until now.

Another thing that I'm quickly learning is to take the time to write elegant code. For starters, I'm naturally an impatient person that likes to get things done as quickly as possible. I would simply write whatever code would make the code run, ignoring all organization and D.R.Y. (Don't repeat yourself) principles. This technique never really got me into trouble because I never wrote long pieces of code. But now that I'm using those bad habits into my code that spans over 200 lines, I'm finding my code extremely difficult to read. I'm thinking to myself, "Did I even write this stuff?" I can only imagine how crucial things like this will be when I'm working in a company where they have thousands of lines of code.


Last thing before I finish up the blog post. I reached out to a bunch of my future classmates and communication with about 3 of them on a regular basis. I'm very much a people person and love getting to know people. I decided to set up a dinner for all of us to gather and get to know each other. I got 4 out of the 8 confirmed students and a couple more will let me know if they'll be available that night (they're coming the night before the bootcamp starts! Talk about cutting it close!).

Overall, I'm really liking the vibes I'm getting from my future classmates. The more I talk with them, the more I'm starting to think that I actually have the most exposure to the actual languages that we're going to be using(front-end, node, and Ruby on Rails). There is one guy who's currently working as a visual designer at Zappo's and very comfortable using Photoshop and Illustrator (super jealous of those skills). You can never go wrong learning those technologies. I just hope that I'm one of the students that is a little ahead of the others so that I can help other students. I heard that Coding Dojo hires their own T.A.'s and instructors from these bootcamps and I wouldn't mind teaching people how to code every day. Teaching people skills that have a great R.O.I. would be so rewarding. Much better than being a college professor.

Time is flying by. I can't wait to start!