I ended my last entry with a description of Vietnamese coffee that made me so jittery that I had to move. When I got back home instead of sleep I decided to go for a run. I ran around the block for as long as I could and when my body couldn't run any further I walked several more laps. A combination of movement, caffeine, and punk rock got me jacked up and feeling invincible that afterwards I sat down and decided that I would not sleep until I complete the doubly link-list assignment. Two hours later it was midnight and I wasn't tired or done with the assignment but I knew I had to sleep. So I jumped into bed and laid there for an hour before sleep caught up. Did I suffer for that today.
I barely got five hours of sleep last night. Out of all the days I could have neglected sleep I had to do it today because this day we started the next milestone subject: MVC frameworks in the form of CodeIgniter. As technology grows automation is bound to happen. There use to be a time when automation applied to only physical labor where a machine could do the work of dozens of men at faster rates and a fraction of the cost. So many low-skilled laborers loose their jobs every year because of automation and the people holding higher positions believe they are protected because there is no way a machine could do their jobs more effectively and at cheaper costs but they are coming for them one step at a time. Perhaps a day might come when I get hired to build a machine to replace me upon completion (the plot twist in Kurt Vonnegut's Player Piano). Call it evolution I suppose.
MVC stands for model-view-controller and web application frameworks like CodeIgniter have their architecture built in that format. It is the division of labor between the database, the user interface, and the controller that mediates data that is passed between them. Companies built them because they've noticed patterns in development that could be automated, making it easier and faster for developers to create their programs. The Wall I created last weekend mimics modern popular websites like Facebook and Twitter but it doesn't have their flexibility or adaptability. I could spend weeks, even months, trying to get my site up to parr and that would involve thousands of additional lines of code. The alternative is to use pre-built functions on CodeIgniter that would significantly shorten my workload. Most web developers need to know MVC if they expect to be taken seriously.
I mentioned earlier that I spent the three months prior to Coding Dojo teaching myself Ruby on Rails, a framework similar to CodeIgniter except Rails is written in Ruby while CodeIgniter is written in PHP. I barely understood what I was reading but the experience left me with a basic understanding on how MVC works. So when the instructor began lecturing the class on MVC I kept up. After the morning lecture we began the chapter. Since the instructor could only cover so much during the lecture we had to read the rest ourselves and half the chapter involved just that, an annoyance for everyone. The details were a little hard to follow and I'm often finding myself rereading entire sections. Most of my classmates are ahead of me, if only slightly.
I tell myself that today was an off day on account of an inadequate sleep the previous night. My mind did something today it rarely has been doing since the bootcamp began and wander off. After each session I go on wikipedia and read up on something that catches my interest. At that moment it was automation, as you could guess from my earlier rant, and how humanity seriously needs to reconsider its role in a future where they are not needed in as high numbers as before. Does the future belong to man or the machine?
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