Alpha Conclusion

This has been a fairly tumultuous ride over the first month, but I've learned an incredible amount. From using Sinatra, which was simply an enormous understanding challenge for me, to getting a better grasp on Ruby. It's unfortunate that my peer-programming partner will no longer be programming, but I still have the same opportunity to learn and gain access to neat, interesting information.

I also learned a lot about programming virtually, including the way I can lean on teamtreehouse wherever possible. They were invaluable in understanding javascript and jquery, but would've perhaps been redundant with other items.

The biggest challenge going forward, I think, will be tying what I did in pre-work to what I'll need to do now; it was easy when it was fresh, but it may not be so easy as time moves on. Additionally, you're obviously trying to keep a lot of languages straight; I've occasionally found myself using a jquery selector in ruby, for instance, or confusing how I would use a class selector across jquery and css, but I think that's likely pretty natural. The important thing is clearly just continuing to dedicate the time and energy to getting better.

Launch Academy Experience

I've written extensively in a series of marketing materials why I think the Launch Academy experience is different, but in sum, Launch Academy takes the information you can obtain for free on the internet and actually synthesizes it into something you can use. Just for instance, how am I to know that I should learn things in a certain order, or even what I should learn? Should I learn java? Should I learn SQL? As someone who was basically learning free-form, I had no idea. Launch Academy tells me what I need to know and provides feedback on what I'm doing.

Regarding what I've learned this week, first and foremost, it's that there is never simply one solution to the problem. Kat and I worked extensively on Hangman and I was thrilled that we were able to use both an "Until" loop and a "While" loop in order to generate the same information. Minor victories, but victories nonetheless. I also really enjoyed using the katas that were available to us because it's invaluable to produce your own code and THEN see the optimized code, as opposed to struggling through your own code and then simply looking at the answers, which is unfortunately something that has happened to me throughout learning. It simply completely saps the memorization of what you're doing.

Sudocode was a very helpful concept for me to learn, but unfortunately I haven't really put it into practice very much even though quite frankly I probably should have. Just as an example of this, I was working on the List Statistics problem and I wrote out code that was similar to code I wrote last night, when in fact it was unnecessary and riddled with bugs. I wasn't being asked to sort and I'm not sure why I felt compelled to do that other than I had done it in the past. When I really sat down and thought about what I had to do I realized there was a simpler way. Thinking simple and thinking lazy is just so much harder than "doing it" and that's something I need to work on!

Launch Academy Debut

I couldn't be more excited to have an opportunity to start with Launch Academy in their Beta online program with Kat. It should be terrific.

I'll add a more detailed post shortly, but wanted to comment a bit on the name and where I got my start in coding ... I lived with Launch Academy staffer Adam Sheehan in 2009, and he had a website (believe it was hobocoder.com or something of that nature). I enjoyed it mightily despite being perhaps the only reader, and even linked it to the sports website I was working with at the time. Nonetheless, hobocoder2 is something of an homage to the person that helped me get started on this front.