We are officially into the second half of the Bootcamp. This week we began working with Back End programming — but first — a weekly update!
Weekly Update
Anna and I made plans to grab lunch on Thursday. As soon as I hopped in her car, we saw a group of Bootcampers coming out of Awesome Inc, clearly deliberating on where to eat. Anna had said that she wanted to meet some more of my classmates, so I hopped out and invited everyone to join us!
We went over to Wine and Market, a really cool sandwich spot and boutique grocery store over on Jefferson Street. I always feel like I’m in the hot seat when showing a new food spot to others but everyone seemed to enjoy it! I personally think their #9 — a turkey, strawberry rhubarb preserve, and goat cheese on ciabatta bread — is one of the best sandwiches in Lex.
On Thursday, Awesome Inc held a fun little Halloween celebration! There was a caramel apple bar as well as some pumpkin decorating. It was a lot of fun — can you guess which pumpkin was mine?
L-R: Wine and Market's #9 and #7 Sandwiches
L-R: Anna, Rachael, Sam, and Ethan
Some 'Awesome' looking pumpkins!
On Friday, the UK Men’s Basketball team played their second exhibition game against Kentucky State. Anna and I had 2 extra tickets, so I offered them up to anyone in the Bootcamp and Ian was the first to claim them. Ian and his wife Olivia joined us for dinner at Sawyer's before the game. I’m starting to get a little ‘foodie’-ish with all of these recommendation, but I do think that the chili and burgers at Sawyer's are the best in town. We sat in our actual seats (upper arena) for the first half, but took our chances in the second half by snagging some open seats about 8 rows from the floor. Luckily no one kicked us out, and we were a lot closer to the action! Additionally, during halftime we got some very yummy Rupp Arena ice cream. 😍
Sawyer's 'Chili Pie': Fritos, Cheese, and Chili!
A group selfie at the UK game! L-R: Me, Anna, Olivia, Ian
Anna and Ice Cream!
This week we started learning Back End development! We began by learning some PHP. PHP stands for ‘PHP: Hypertext Processor’, which is a recursive acronym, apparently something that programmers love. We built a practice server, and attempted to build an API that could pull data from that server. I might have gone a little bit overboard when I decided to add 1,000,000 items to my nonsense database…
About midweek, we jumped into Laravel. Laravel is a PHP framework that is billed as an elegant and expressive means to do Back End programming. I have really enjoyed learning Laravel so far. We have been working our way through this "Laravel 6 From Scratch" video series. I find it to be a pretty fun way to learn! I follow along with the video, pausing it to apply what I just learned to my own code. Once I feel like I have come to an understanding about some topic, I then try to summarize it in my notes.
Around chapter 3 of the Laracast series, my comprehension level started to drop. I found the same thing happening with several of our recent learning endeavors (React, PHP). I will make a decent amount of progress, but then the wave of confusion washes over me and I have to swim back to shore. A solution that I have found is to go ahead and skim over the remaining material. I don’t stress about the fact that I am not entirely following along. Rather, I am trying to get a broad picture, to see how the pieces fit together. I then go back and read (or watch) the material again. When I started getting lost in the Laracasts, I turned the playback speed to 2x and powered through the remaining videos. This allowed me to get a broad overview of many of the cool Laravel features.
One thing that I have been struggling with is getting enough sleep. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not falling asleep in class, but when learning new material, I find that even a little bit of extra fatigue really hinders my ability to learn new concepts. My goal for next week, is to go to bed an hour earlier! That plan sounds great, except that I had the same goal last week. Oh well.
I slept in both Saturday and Sunday mornings, and then started
rewatching the Laracasts. I found this really helpful — I
was fresh and alert, and was able to absorb the material
really well. I am really starting to see how useful Laravel
is. Right now, its only hindrance is that it is
so full of features that it can be a little difficult to
understand at first. While working with JavaScript, I would
create one or two JS files, an HTML file, and a CSS file.
When I run Laravel new project name, it makes
a massive amount of files. I just went through and tried to count
how many files this actually does create. I was around 140~
when I got into the vendor bin and realized that it
would be a waste of time to keep counting. This is obviously
a great thing — look how much functionality comes built in
to Laravel. It does mean, however, that the learning curve is a little
bit steep, and a fair bit intimidating. I look forward to a
time when I can make better use of some of these powerful features!
Next week we start the week off with a remote day! President Trump is holing a political rally in the evening, and most of downtown will be blocked off starting at 2pm. Traffic will be a nightmare, and because of this we will be working from home. We will spend the first day or two working through the rest of the Laracasts, and will then move into the Laravel Library project. Tuesday is election day. I’m looking forward to voting, and will be excited to see how the election plays out across the state. Finally, on Tuesday night (9:30pm — remember my earlier goal about bedtimes?) #2 UK faces off against #1 Michigan State. I’m very excited for the game — hopefully it won't be a repeat of last years UK – Duke matchup!