Coding Dojo has this philosophy of learning through struggling that emphasizes spending chunks of time trying to figure out the solution to a problem on your own before you start asking for help. By making an honest effort of finding your own solution to a problem you are more likely to remember the solution when it is finally revealed to you. Today had to have been the first day that lesson actually hit me.
Today's lessons were the same as yesterday in preparation for something big that will begin tomorrow. During orientation last week the instructor explained a coding challenge known as "The Wall" which will act as a sort of crucible for our first-stack experience. The Wall is scheduled to begin tomorrow and will go on until Friday night. That frightened me since I barely understood how advanced PHP and Sessions worked. I spent the entire day working on a single assignment and only finished it by following the instructor's guidelines. Even though it isn't considered cheating I did feel like a failure for relying on that and not truly understanding how my code worked. Then came the evening and most of my classmates took off for the night, leaving me alone without any help or guidelines to help me out in the next assignment. I asked one of my classmates, SP, for help before he took off and he dropped a hint that the solution rests on a flag we need to put in our input tags. I tried to decipher what he meant and finally it was like all the day's effort finally paid off cause I knew what I had to do. It took me about three hours but I finally finished the second assignment of the day and I actually understood what the code meant. Boy is this day ending on a good note.
If you're actually interested in knowing what exactly did I do: I built a basic login page that tested if the user's inputs (name, email, and password) were valid. Three hours ago it looked impossible but I finished and am proud to say that it works perfectly.
I keep praising Twitter Bootstrap for making my life so much easier and giving me a certain joy I have never felt before in coding. I expressed this feeling to many of my classmates, but like I was a year ago they saw Bootstrap as too complicated to use. Then for some reason today word got around that Bootstrap makes coding simpler and prettier and now everyone wants to know. Some of them couldn't understand its appeal and expressed the same frustration I felt a year ago. When I tried to explain it to them they seemed confused as to why I love this framework so much.
Before lunch an announcement was made about an upcoming hackathon. One of the instructors had grandparents who escaped from North Korea during the Korean War. Because of that interesting piece of family history he announced Coding Dojo's collaboration with a North Korean refugee group to sponsor a hackathon starting at the end of the month to build an app that will spread attention against North Korea and the importance of rescuing dissidents. The winning group will win a free course from Coding Dojo. VT was intrigued and he started asking others if they wanted to form a group. I said okay. Why not? I've already done two of these and if nothing is won at least I'll get free food and gifts for my participation.
After lunch the career counselor came in to lecture us about job search strategies after we complete the bootcamp. I listened for a while before it started to sound like much of that stuff my college career counselor told me so I went back to work. Still, the counselor did remind me that I have to think about a plan for when I complete this. I have some ideas about where I want to work and how to apply but my worry is if the companies and their recruiters would take the time to interview me. I can't remember how many times I've submitted a resume for a position and almost never hear back from the company, even to tell me that I've been passed over. Will it be any different after this?
I shouldn't worry too much about that right now. I'm not even halfway through the bootcamp and I have The Wall coming up tomorrow.
Around 5pm a friend from college called to chat. He called at a good time since I needed a brief distraction from the mess on screen. He also reminded me that I have a life outside of the Dojo. I've been so consumed by this for the last three weeks that I am forgetting all the people who I knew out there. Days go by so fast and college is starting to feel like years ago. I can't believe all that stuff actually happened.
Another long day has gone by and an even longer day is waiting. I'm feeling better about it after the last assignment. Now I need sleep. Night.
No comments:
Post a Comment