When I first began the program (starting with root pre-requisite courses), I was extremely nervous. I didn’t know where this would lead or what I would be getting myself into. However, I knew that I enjoyed coding and that my passion lies within building things, disassembling them and analyzing them. Through that feeling, I made my decision and signed up. My first two days of the full immersion program has been nothing but great, I’ve never had so much fun learning in general. I can’t help but feel that this will be the start of a great new chapter in my life. I thought today’s Math.floor and Math.random concepts were a little difficult to fully grasp, but I feel that our lead instructor Dan has helped facilitate the process. I knew the purpose of these concepts before I began the program, but learning about what’s going on under the hood today really grilled it into my head. I’m not sure if I can really say understanding certain coding concepts is easy, because I feel that there’s so much going on in the Javascript engine, but I’m definitely looking forward to learning more about them. I can’t think of a single moment in my life in which I wanted to go to class to learn, but today has truly changed that.
This week felt quite long, but was definitely one of the most productive weeks of my life. Learning about functions and loops were quite fun with Dan’s analogies, and while I feel that I have a strong understanding of them at this point, I know that there will be a time in the near future in which I won’t have any idea what’s going on. This is something I’ve come to accept after my first week here at LearningFuze, no matter how smart or great you feel after being able to code something that actually runs properly, it’s only the beginning. Even though I don’t specifically enjoy seeing new errors or seeing code not running properly, I believe it shows progress. Since you’re constantly moving forward in a coding bootcamp, there’s not a day that goes by where I won’t run into a new problem. While problem solving can seem like what can only be described as some kind of frustration simulator, I’ve come to accept them as a sign of progress.
“Success is not final, failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts.”
- Winston S. Churchill
One of the most challenging concepts I've come upon is logic. While it sounds simple, I couldn't believe how difficult it was for me to actually implement certain concepts using it. I didn't know where to begin at times and I was completely stumped when trying to programmatically create a simple chessboard with alternating colors. I knew what to use, but I couldn't figure out how to implement the code properly. On the other hand, scope (which can be rather tricky) has become somewhat easier to identify and my mind looks for it almost instantly when I'm debugging my code. Functions were also quite tricky for me when we were getting into it on a deeper level, especially when I'm dealing with function calls versus invocations. But I feel like I got the hang of it now, although I still feel a little off on why and when to use either/or. Questions like these are why I signed up for a bootcamp in the first place. There are so many questions that I have, but with the speed our cohort is moving at, I feel like I tend to forget them. Today I've made it a goal to constantly remind myself to ask our instructors these questions as they arise because I will end up forgetting about them as we move onto other topics.