The Beginning
What started as a general curiosity for coding capabilities, and jealousy for what I saw people create on their computer/website, turned into a full-time studying commitment spanning from June through next week. I can still remember the Bootcamp prework I found on Flatiron’s site as a way to gauge interest/commitment with the program. It started with very basic HTML and CSS terms, then progressed to JavaScript fundamentals and manipulating the DOM a little bit. That’s when I felt hooked and decided I wanted to commit 5+ months to learning more about what software engineering was.
The problem was, I didn’t know the first thing about reading/writing code, styling a page, or even any command line commands.
Milestones Along The Way
Pry
I remember one of the first lines of code that really blew me away was the pry gem. So many of my lessons were saved from dragging on even longer because of this new ability to insert binding.pry inside a method and having it pause and show inside my terminal window. Ultimately, this gem helped me finish my Command Line Interface project because I was having trouble parsing the JSON from the API I was using for team info, and I was able to break it down into a team_info hash.
Data Types
Maybe this should be first, but I don’t think I had a grasp of them until I finished my first project. Ruby is a pure Object-Oriented Language and has these data types (and it shares most of these with JavaScript :
- Numbers- pretty self explanatory…
- Strings- “letters that represent a word or sentence inside single or double quotes”
- Boolean- true/false
- Arrays- [stored, data, between, brackets]
- Hashes- key:value pairs, like an object literal in JavaScript
Object Oriented Programming
The idea of abstracting all the methods I had learned up to this point was [insert mind-blown gif here]! Object Orientation allows us to more efficiently manipulate the object we’re wanting to change rather than the logic needed to change it because we can assume if code works one way once, it’ll always work that way if we pass in the same parameters. Being on the backend of the software engineering program now, I can see how this section on OO Ruby started laying the groundwork for its cousin, React, which we’d learn a couple months later.
Scraping and APIs
Pulling information from an outside source is admittedly still a learning process for me, but I’d say learning about it made me start to feel like I could do useful things with code. Coding was no longer just this idea, but it was something I could show people by taking bits from their favorite site and using it in my projects.
SQL and ActiveRecord
I learned rather quickly that different programmers favor different topics and take longer to comprehend other ones (more on that later.) For me, SQL came easier than the other topics we learned. For whatever reason, selecting stored data and relating classes to each other was one of those things that just made sense. Finally, all those User classes we’d learned to make wouldn’t have to disappear right away!
JavaScript
This made me feel like a beginner programmer again. It felt like there was so little carryover from Ruby to JS, but in reality the abstract ideas really helped me learn the new language. I’m not going to lie, I spent more time studying during this month than I did for any of the other sections we covered. But after seeing how many available jobs there are with JS as a preferred known language, I’m so glad I did. React was another one that took me a long time to get the hang of. It’s funny how the things that are supposed to make our lives easier can sometimes take longer to learn than just doing it the old way. But after building my project and all that it required me to go out and figure out, I’m excited to keep diving deeper into this library/framework.
Confidence Level
Getting this blog back on track. I’m not going to say my confidence grew with each new topic we learned in the lessons. In fact, it often dropped when I met a new hard challenge I hadn’t seen before. But figuring it out, whether through YouTube, other classmates, or finding similar struggle posts on StackOverflow, takes your confidence in your code to a new level every time. And outside of confidence, I’ll say my excitement for coding more and more grew with each new topic we covered. I’m thankful 5 months into learning that I get excited to sit down at my computer and create something, figure something out, or make something better. And that’s not a feeling I’ve had at most jobs I’ve worked in before deciding to learn to code.