Prodigal son returns to blog (part one)

When I last left off with my reflection it was halfway through Week 3. We are now at the end of our journey. Two weeks after, in fact, and I have had a good old break and time to reflect. It has been absolutely non-stop the last few weeks. To make up for my poor performance and lack of reflection I will proceed to break down the last few weeks and comment on each week.

Week 4

Databases, databases, databases. How easy you seemed. Looking back on this week I took such a liking to databases, I thought to myself “wow, this is where we store our information? How easy and convenient” What a sweet Summer child I was. Databases I would soon discover weren’t overly difficult just incredibly fiddly, I found, to implement. Fiddly and laborious. But I will say that this week did help me get a better understanding of entity relations and I think provided a good base for what was to come in later weeks.

Weekend challenge: Chitter
This was a toughie. I didn’t get as far as I had hoped as I really wanted to tackle the twilio stuff. I have since learned that doing the chitter challenge comfortably is a good place to aim for!

Week 5

Week 5 was the first of three team projects and it was around this time that I really started to feel the dreaded imposter syndrome kick in. I was group with some really talented programmers and I felt really out of place and a bit of a spare part really. I didn’t really deal with at the time and the following weeks were spent questioning whether this is something I could do!

The challenge itself was difficult because everyone seemed to be moving a mile a minute when I was crawling along… But it was the beginning of a lesson I would come to learn and accept a few weeks later.

Weekend challenge: Bowling Ruby time
I really tried jumping into this one head first. I made diagrams and everything! I even started doing a frontend for it which I realised wasn’t in the criteria but I was super enthusiastic! And then I just kept hitting bugs and failing tests and I was reaaally mad because the code looked good! This was the first time in the course that I reached out to a coach for review and it did help but I was very done with the challenge because we were going to revisit it the following week.

Week 6

I enjoyed this week! The thermostat challenge was fun! JavaScript was fun! Pairing was fun! I look back on this now and I really appreciated this week considering the week before was such a downer. JavaScript was super weird compared to Ruby but it was such a refreshing break learning something brand new that no one else knew. I felt like I was at the same level as everyone else and it was great.

Weekend challenge: Bowling JavaScript time
I’ll be honest this one escaped me a bit, hubris meant that I left it waaay too late on the Sunday and hit a roadblock a few hours in. I did manage to find a nice little JS node for sequential numbers which was a massive help and something I’ll definitely utilise when the time arises.

Week 7

I can’t much remember what happened in Week 7. It was a bit of a blur and all I seem to remember was the…

Weekend challenge: Chitter API & News Summary
You might notice a bit of a theme from Week 5 onwards… I started doing the Chitter API challenge and I didn’t actually have the foggiest idea what an API was and what I was meant to do. I spent most of Sunday morning working on this before moving onto the News Summary challenge screaming Sunken Cost Fallacy and that this was the best way to go. Naturally I didn’t get much done and decided I deserved one weekend where I didn’t do much.

After speaking with my peers the Monday morning, they too confirmed that they didn’t get much done. This made me feel a bit better.

I’m breaking this into two parts because I rambled a bit and it looks like I have more entries than I do!