Just wanted to do a quick recap of the first day (yesterday). First of all, “yesterday” definitely feels more like “last week.” I usually skip to the part where people are talking about job hunting towards the end of their webdev bootcamp/cohort/squadron/etc. experience, so I’m not sure if this is common or not. And it probably has more to do with what we went over today than it does what we covered yesterday.
Yesterday was a little grueling. My coding muscles are being shocked into response this week already. I’ve spent the last few weeks focused on making sure I would have funding to come and a place to stay once I moved here to Houston from Baton Rouge. After a great talk about the importance of blogging (Meta!) and setting the paths for ourselves before someone else does it for us, we jumped straight in to Ruby. And I won’t lie, to begin with I was a little lost.
Luckily my neighbors and JB, our rock-star first week instructor, were willing to jump in when I had questions. But it had been so long since I’d even opened the terminal in my computer that I had to start at, “OK, so it’s cd ruby, then mkdir, right? I just closed my terminal, how do I run the code I’m putting in Atom again?” I didn’t really have time to jump on the prework I got last week and I think it showed day one for sure.
Although I’ve done some online coding classes, it was always hit or miss trying to complete projects without feeling like I just kind of in a void out by myself. There are always online coaching options and forums, but nothing beats having the ability to raise your hand and say, “Wait, why did you do that?” or even just, “Help!” Which is 100% why I chose to do the Iron Yard over those online-only classes and honestly why I chose them over some other boot camps.
Maybe it’s because we’re in the South? Maybe it’s just a group of really awesome people all found each other, but I left that first day feeling a little lost and lot encouraged. I came in this morning and ironed out what I had done wrong on the homework from yesterday and then jumped right into another three hours of intermittently getting it and being lost in the weeds. Tonight I’m going back through some of the prewor, as well as hitting up Try Ruby as a great intro JB recommended before finishing up the last bit of my homework for tonight. I think it will help to see a little bit of Ruby from the high dive before I leap back in.
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