Day 18: Codeigniter

No morning lecture today but nothing to worry for we had plenty of things to learn on the learning platform. Just wanted to give people as example of what other things go on in the Dojo besides coding. In the mornings, all the early birds pull money together to buy breakfast food. We always eat pretty healthy stuff. It's a hassle to prep breakfast and eat at home before arriving. Instead, while we eat we have discussions about the assignments, future jobs, or jump straight into coding.

The community truly is the reason why anyone should do this. It's incredible what happens when 10 people come together and spend over 70 hours a week together. As I'm typing this, we still have over half of our cohort trying to fully understand linked lists to make sure they're prepped for technical interviews. It's quite magical.

Today I spent the whole day learning Codeigniter, the popular MVC framework for the PHP language. I'm starting to understand why Coding Dojo has us learn an MVC framework at this point and not earlier. Learning an MVC framework is already difficult, however trying to learn MVC without having a solid foundation is even more difficult.

Whenever we learn new concepts we always have a very basic assignment like making a application that shows what the current time is.

I haven't spent so much time in one day on learning one thing before jumping into the assignments. The way that the Models, Views, and Controllers speak to each other is significantly different than how it is done when the code is procedural.

To be honest, I am getting a little frustrated because concepts aren't coming as easily as they usually do. But I just gotta keep ramming into the wall and it'll eventually break down.

One other really cool thing I want to point out is the video code reviews that the TAs do for us. Here is just a snapshot of a TA going through my code pointing out what I did well and what I didn't do so well on. They really do give great feedback that I use in all future projects. There's a lot of nasty code out there and I don't want to be contributing to it!