Day 2 of CS Prep

Yesterday was a momentous day on 2 fronts. For one, I finished my first round of 100 Days of Code on Twitter. Personally, I didn't really change anything out of my typical routine for the last 6 months to make this happen other than tweet about it once a day. The actual act of coding for at least an hour every day is something I've been doing since May 26th, but most days I spend 4 to 6 hours. It is nice to have an extra layer of accountability, though. While I didn't change anything, I still mark this as a great accomplishment. Before I started this journey, I feel like I had issues with commitment. I've started a lot of things, but only got part way into them before I got sidetracked onto something else. I've never been more committed to anything in my life than I have been in the last 6 months. If I had to express the reason why it's different this time, I would say it's the challenge and enjoyment I get out of coding and problem solving. Other than coding, I suppose I've been committed to playing golf since I was 10, and I think I stuck with it for these same reasons. If golf were an easy game, I might have gotten bored pretty quickly. Instead, it took me years to get to a level of mediocrity and many more to become decently good.

I also had my first day of Codesmith's CS Prep yesterday, a 2-week program meant to prepare students for a bootcamp, specifically Codesmith's bootcamp. The course is taught by a guy named David who himself just finished up Codesmith's bootcamp, and is now staying on as a fellow. You could tell he had been trained by Will Sentance, as I recognized several lines and certainly some styling very similar to Will's. He has an engaging personality and I think it will be a fun 2 week program. Yesterday wasn't anything radically new as far as material for me, nor do I think much of it will be, but I expect to have these concepts completely cemented in my brain by the end of the course. For about 2 hours, David taught in a similar style to Will and then we broke out for pair programming, which is always great. I got paired up with someone who had basically just started learning JavaScript, but already had a pretty nice grasp of the basics. I felt as though I were a bit more advanced than her, which is an unfamiliar position for me, but I took advantage of the opportunity to communicate technically and in a way even a beginner could understand. Overall, it was a very good learning experience for me, and I felt like I walked away a little bit better at communicating technically.

Today is my birthday, but I'm treating it like any other day. I was fortunate enough to have the day off, so every chance I got, I studied. I'm still working on Colt Steele and Stephen Grider's The New JavaScript Bootcamp, which I feel like I might never finish. I would have to say, out of all the Udemy courses I've taken, I think I've learned the most from this course. Colt's section was great, and he covered a lot of ground, basically JavaScript from start to finish. But, Stephen Grider's section has been so much more informative and engaging. Instead of just copying his code while building a project, he's taking the time to dissect the code line-by-line and explain anything that could be a bit tricky. Not to mention, the projects have been a lot of fun to build so far. The first was a simple timer app, but it was really cool. The second one called a movie database API and we built a search function. We then made the search function generic enough to where I could use it in other apps with ease. We're now building a really cool maze game using this awesome library called MatterJS, which is really fun to use. I still have about 25 hours to go in this course, so I'm sure there's much more to learn.

Until tomorrow!