Day 11: Orientation (part 2) and Database Design

What a first day. I've been here for thirteen hours. I came in at 8am and spent thirty minutes prepping before orientation and got introduced to my entire class. There are a total of 21 students enrolled, myself included; 20 of which are onsite while one of them is going hybrid and we won't see her for another six weeks. The class is very diverse with students from all over the country and the world. From across the country we have people from as far as Florida and Rhode Island; from overseas they are from South Korea and the UK. Some came just for the bootcamp while others have moved here permanently with the intent of finding work after they complete the course. Some are recent college graduates while others have been out for a while and have professional experience. Some have engineering backgrounds while others never finished. Some are married and two have children. The ones from out of state all say that there is way too much sun, wonder how the locals stand the heat, awed by San Francisco, and horrified at the real estate prices. The British guy arrived only yesterday and is recovering from jet lag and the one from Utah said this state smells like flowers. Fun crowd. Things are bound to happen.

Orientation lasted an hour and it covered the usual topics about what we should expect in the next thee months, office rules, and advice from the older classes. I was still waking up and might have dozed off for a minute. After orientation my first instinct was to leave, as it has been a habit for school all my life. At the start of a new school term every class would have orientation that would last the entire lecture and then we'd all leave, expecting the work to begin on the next lecture. I had to remind myself that this wasn't school. That part of my life ended last year.

Instead after lecture we began the day's assignment: database design. We spent the last two weeks learning the front-end stuff, now is the time to learn about what happens in the background. Every website has data that is saved into databases such as the user's email and password. So we spent the day designing abstract models for future implementation. Earlier this year I read a MYSQL book that covered the basics and I had an idea about how this all worked. 

After using their material for the last two weeks I knew what I had to do and got to work immediately. This was my first day and already I was typing away like I've spent those last two weeks here. I've been setting up my databases and apparently there is more than one way to set them up and everyone has their own approach to it. There wasn't a single right answer, which wasn't something I was use to. Just finish the work and if you find out later that the setup was all wrong then just redo it!

At noon we broke for lunch. I saw on Yelp there was a restaurant nearby and my classmates and I decided to walk there. Ten minutes later we arrived and saw that it closed down but no one bothered to notify Yelp. So we walked back and drove this time to a different place. After lunch it was more of the same stuff, followed by a group exercise on the subject at 1:30pm, and by 5pm I finished the day's activities and decided to get a head start on tomorrow's assignment. Most of the class took off by 7pm and it was just me and the British dude, VT, who stayed until 10pm. He left just minutes ago cause his jet lag was too much and I'm going to take off soon as well. There are still people here from the older classes and I hear that some of them sleep here. They warned that I could be doing the same thing as the harder full-stacks start coming by. Can't really think about that now, I got to get up tomorrow at 5am so I can be here at 8am.

First day huh?