Day 55: Ruby And TDD

I had a good break from coding this weekend. On Saturday I went to Davenport Beach to celebrate a friend's birthday. It was fun and he got a little carried away with the celebration and everybody had to look after him and make sure he got home without making a mess. I slept in on Sunday and didn't really begin my day until afternoon. After some rest, tv, and healthy food I finally buckled down and prepare for job applications. I updated my resume, opened up an account with Indeed and submitted resumes to a bunch of positions. Finding a job is difficult and it will be important that I start right now with three weeks left on the clock. VT recommended submitting 10-20 resumes a day but I think I'll submit 10 per day for now. Job hunting always filled me with a sense of dread because of the uncertainty but this time it's being countered with a sense of empowerment. Prior to the bootcamp I'd apply to a limited number of jobs each week cause many of the positions asked for skills that I never even heard of, until now. I looked through 10 positions and I felt confident submitting stronger resumes to those positions.

I woke up this morning earlier than usual and got some good news in my email inbox: I passed my Black Belt Exam!!! I felt like a conquerer as I was preparing for my day and there were some congratulations said when I walked into the dojo.

A new class began today and my class has moved once again to the back of the dojo. There are less than ten of us showing up on average each day, the dedicated ones. The others have either dropped out or doing this from home. I don't like seeing this cause it affects morale. I mean we all paid to be here. 

Today we begin Ruby on Rails. I had struggled with learning that for almost two months before starting the bootcamp. It got to the point where I looked for every excuse for not heading to the library. So when the bootcamp started I thought that the instructors had some special way of presenting it to us that will make it easier for us to understand. Turns out that there was no big secret. I just needed to begin coding simpler material and logging in hundreds of hours until I understood what I was doing and was ready to move onto bigger subjects.

There were two chapters covered today: the first on installation and the second on the Ruby language and TDD, test-driven development. I've been doing Ruby since last year and Rails for two months so installation was quick and so was the first half of the second chapter. TDD was a topic I was familiar with, it was the process of automating test cases, saving developers hundred of hours of doing it themselves. I didn't like doing it during my independent study but after three months of coding the buildup made it easier to understand. I've heard since last year that Ruby is pure OOP but that never made much sense to me until now. By being pure OOP it becomes easier to build up code and pass attributes to subclasses and superclasses. 

It's the end of the day and I'm only two short assignments away from finishing the chapter. I'm getting off to a great reunion with Rails.

I'd go on but I still need to submit more resumes tonight.