One week in... as motivated as ever!

Author: Justin Kenyon

Days 3, 4, and 5 flew by at Metis. We worked on new concepts and we were introduced to OOP (Object-oriented Programming). This is usually where I have, in the past with different languages, gotten either frustrated because I didn't understand, or just got lazy and started copying and pasting, and, therefore, stopped learning. This time, however, everything seems different. I am having more and more "Aha!" moments than ever before. Those moments motivate me more than anything when I am are struggling to understand certain new concepts. I have hit a couple of walls in the last few days, but have been successful at climbing over each and every one.

On Friday, we had two great talks by the developers at thoughtbot. Someone asked a great question about using github to show our very rusty, and easily indentifiable as novice, code on public repos in case someone in the future sees how poorly we wrote code. Chris Toomey, developer @ thoughtbot, had a great answer. He explained that it is much more valuable to have a history of how you have progressed as a developer in such a short amount of time, than to have no history at all. I was in total agreement. I had already been pushing all my code for week 1 of the bootcamp, and will continue to as the bootcamp progresses. Not only for others to see my progression, but to prove to myself that all these things that seem impossibly difficult to achieve now, will seem like small pebbles in the road 6 months from now.

In the interest of transparency, here is the short amount of history that I have with a recent hangman game I have been writing. You can see my public github for this code here: hangman.rb

Here was the first commit, definitely not working yet:

Here was the second commit, fixed some stuff, but still really can't play it

...And, here is my third commit. The game works and can be played, all that's left is some refactoring (for another day)