Happy super ~spooky~ Friday the 13th!! This week was our final week of Bootcamp Prework and it really seemed like these last four weeks just flew by!
I was a little nervous going into the Prework phase. I wasn’t really sure what to expect: Would the workload or complexity of the material be too much to handle? Would I realize, once I had become more immersed in coding, that it wasn’t really for me? Thankfully I found neither of these to be the case — The course material during Prework was challenging but exciting, and I’ve had a lot more fun than I excepted to writing code!
Prework Week 4
This week was lighter on the readings, and started to skew more towards project-based work. We started with another MDN module, this one introducing us to some more JavaScript building blocks — things like loops, functions, return values, and events.
Next, we moved on to four coding projects. Our first project still involved a little bit of handholding. For the Image Gallery, we were given some starter code, as well as instructions on what parts of the code we still needed to fill in. After the Image Gallery project, however, we were on our own.
My biggest takeaway from this week's assignments has been that I have become a pretty big Pseudo Code enthusiast! For the Countdown Timer assignment, I felt like I had an idea of how the code could work pretty early on. I did jot down a rough outline of the code, but didn’t bother to mentally run through the various steps of my proposed coding plan.
I then jumped right into writing the code, and several hours later, I was approaching something that resembled a Countdown Timer. It was only when I was trying to work in some final bits of functionality, that I realized that my initial approach was fatally flawed. Had I used Pseudo Code to work through the logical flow of my program before I started writing code, then I likely would have realized some of these late-stage mistakes early on. Instead, I ended up having to rewrite a lot of my code, costing me several additional hours. Starting with Pseudo Code would likely have saved me both time and headaches
"Measure twice, cut once" Justin (and just about anyone else who has ever built anything)
Reflection: The Prework Period
Each week of Prework presented different challenges and opportunities. Week 1 introduced us to Git, Github, and Command Line. A lot of these new technologies felt very confusing at first. After 4 weeks of (nearly) daily practice, I think I am starting to feel more comfortable... at least with the basics.
Week 2 introduced us to HTML and CSS, and saw us creating our first blog posts! I found the structuring of HTML to be fairly straightforward. Conversely, I really struggled with getting CSS to work. It was challenging to try to understand the various parent/child relationships between the different elements, or to figure out how different properties got inherited or overwritten. Perhaps the most frustrating aspect though, was finally getting your webpage looking how you want it to, only to realize that, if viewed on anything other than a browser window of exactly the same size, that things weren't going to look anything close to how you laid them out.
Week 3 introduced us to JavaScript, while Week 4 added some more fundamentals to our knowledge portfolio. Most of the challenges of working with JavaScript involved coping with the various highs and lows of creative problem solving. First came the high of the eureka moment when you became convinced of a solution to your current problem. Then, the low of this solution only managing to break what you had working before. One thing that helped was to not immediately wad your new idea up and throw it in the trash. I found that many times, pausing to comb through your code for syntax errors could be really helpful — as maybe your new solution might actually work if you hadn’t misspelled a variable or left out a bracket.
Another thing that I found really helpful was occasionally closing my computer. For one, just taking breaks and maybe mulling over a problem while you took a walk could often leave to breakthroughs, to thinking, "why hadn't I thought of that yet". And second, I found that beginning your code with just pen and paper was a really helpful way to start. By forcing myself to slow down, to work through ALL the steps of the problem, and to chart out ALL the functionalities I would need, would often lead to developing a better roadmap and better code. I was then able, still with pen and paper, to start solving these problems and adding various functionalities. This made the act of writing the code a little bit like filling in the blanks.
Bootcamp
I am super excited to start Bootcamp Week 1 on Monday!
I felt like we learned a lot more than I expected to in this introductory period, and I am really stoked to see what we will be learning in our first few weeks of Bootcamp!