Start of the Proper Course, Boris Bikes and Further Reading (Listening)
We have entered our third week at Makers Academy now, which means we are starting on the course proper. The last two weeks have been mostly prep work to get us used to coding, working together and the general ways of working at Makers. Now our schedule has changed to the following:
Monday to Thursday
AM – Workshop and self-directed study (with ‘Practicals’ suggested to work on)
PM – Pair Partnering on Weekly Challenge
Friday
All Day – Friday Challenge
There is lots of work to be getting on with now, but the main thing Makers have said to us which has been echoed by all the past students: “You won’t be able to finish it all”.
To me this seems very odd, I don’t like starting things I am not going to finish, and once I get started on something I don’t like moving away from it before it’s in a good place. I know that at the start I will be trying to do as much as possible, finishing as many of the Practicals and challenges as I can. I have been doing some practice coding in my spare time anyway to keep it fresh in my mind, so I will put some evenings and weekends towards completing more work. However I am sure by the end of the programme I will be looking back on many unfinished pieces of work, and will have hopefully learnt from each one.
Our challenge today was Boris Bikes. Unfortunately this didn’t mean racing them around London, our challenge was to build our own program for managing Boris Bikes; a program to track how many bikes have been taken, how many are left in the dock, ensure that the dock can’t go below zero bikes or above a certain amount, etc.
We made some progress on this in the afternoon, we are using TDD from the start on this one, so writing tests then figuring out the best way to solve the test with our code. We are also doing ‘Feature Tests’ in IRB to see how it reacts in the actual REPL environment. We will continue working on this until Friday when the Friday Challenge takes over.
Also today I decided that I wanted to get more of an idea of whats going on in the world of technology. I am looking for blogs I can read regularly which have interesting information about software development, but for now I have started listening to podcasts. I have a fairly long commute, so podcasts are an ideal way for me to make the commute more bearable whilst still taking in new information about the area that I will be working in. I have had a look at some recommendations and settled on a few to try out:
- The WIRED podcast
- Click (BBC World Service)
- Programming Throwdown
- Hanselminutes
- The Changelog
- Software Engineering Radio
So far I have only listened to a couple of episodes from the WIRED podcast and Click, and both were very interesting. I have yet to get time to listen to the rest, but hopefully will decide on which ones are the most useful and informational. I am sure I will revisit this in another blog, with a proper review for each!
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