Day 17: More OOP, Node and Tree algorithms and intro to MVC framework, Codeigniter

Another jam packed day is in the books with the morning kicking off with an introduction to Object-Oriented Programming. I already had a pretty solid foundation on this concept due to some programming classes at the University of Washington. But I do gotta comment on how well Michael Choi explained everything in class. The analogy he used was from "Age of Empires" and how if you want to upgrade your buildings or soldiers, you can simply inherit from the superclass. It's funny how I have yet to see anyone else use this analogy when so many aspiring developers play video games like this, not to mention it's super engaging. I personally played "Starcraft" but I kind of understood the terminology.

The lecture was followed up by a quick group exercise in which we took the last major assignment, the wall, and figure out a "plan-of-attack" if we were to do it again. Here is my group's plan:

There were some students in the class that were having trouble understanding queries to the database and figuring out how to render everything properly on the browser. To assist those students, there was a special session that went over step-by-step on how to tackle the assignment. This right here is one of my favorite things about Coding Dojo. I know that in other bootcamps, if you simply can't keep up with their curriculum, you're booted out of the program. I can't help but think that's what they have to do in order to "pad their stats".

Alright so after the morning activity we were sent back to continue our assignments. I finished all the sections on Object-Oriented Programming so now I was off to working on some tough optional assignments.

This first assignment was about linked lists. I remember doing this back in college but boy was my memory failing me. Long story short it's just a list that have associations in which you can access the data through traversal. It's very common for interviewers to have technical interviews on this concept.

And of course all programmers know after learning about linked lists, you learned about binary trees. Above is just me trying to figure out how I was going to do a sorting algorithm using trees. Trees are just a special kind of linked list in which you have two children and a parent and it makes it quick and easy to sort or organize data.

After I finished those the optional assignments (which took about 9 hours of my day), I proceeded onto the next chapter, the MVC framework called Codeigniter. In the picture above is just the file structure. Tomorrow I'll be diving into it completely! I've had experience with MVC because of Rails but I wonder what it's going to be like without all the behind the scenes magic!