OOP
Development is a wide topic to learn. New ways to do everything a developer need to do appear everyday. But then, the practices, the basis behind all of these new tools is slow and moves at a steady pace.
You can take it as :
– The tools are waves.
Thousands land on your shores everyday. None is exactly the same as another, every one of them is different, and to a surfer, a fisherman, or anybody who could make us of them, every one of them could be a treasure or a pain.
– The practices are ties.
They also come, but at a very slow pace. They too are very different, and affect anybody much more than waves, but because of that slow pace, we tend to focus less on that.
Well, today was the second day of introduction to Object Oriented Programming. One could probably spend hours writing about such a notion, but I will stick to a one sentence explanation.
Object Oriented Programming is a way to work in development by modeling blocks of code in what people call an “Object”. Wikipedia, among others, explains that much more easily than I do, I encourage you to get there to check what it is about. ;)
Plus, I don’t have much interesting things to say about it so… I won’t say much!
Friends & Brothers
Yesterday, I paired with Jamie, a nice american-name, american-accent girl who does not look like her profile picture and who does NOT like country music (Hehe… Sorry for the private joke). In all honesty, it went well, and if it had been another person, I may have spent a bad time. The challenges were about things that I could not say I master, but an introduction is an introduction. We talked a lot, learned to know each other.
I find that extremely important when you spend most of the time with some people and you have to challenge, and spend most of your time in total freakout mode.
That being said, another part of the day was a bit harder. Dev Bootcamp makes you meet people that have been selected after a particular selection. Only 10% of the people make it apparently. Of course, we are selected because we have a specific set of skills, a particular mindset, and Karim and all the others in charge of admission see things in us that make them think we can make it.
Then, we get grouped with others with the same characteristics, and for 9 weeks, you work with them, play with them, more or less live with them, 100% of the time. During these 9 weeks, you are challenged everyday, stressed out to a point where most would break, and most DO break. Your challenge, just like the others, is to learn what took years or even decade to master to many. As Sherif said, that is insane. We are insane for trying that, but then we have been selected because we are, and only that combined insanity of so many people can help us make it at the end.
In our cohort, we even took it so far as to get a house for 9 of us. If spending most of our times of struggle was not enough, we now spend 100% of our time together.
I may sound overdramatic with that explanation, but my point is that your only way to win at this is brotherhood( + sisterhood, however you say that). We are one, and must stay one. All of us must succeed at the end, and if one of us breaks, we all need to do our best to “repair” him asap to get on the next step.
Yesterday, Stephen had a bad time. Pressure got the best of him for a part of the afternoon. It was not the challenges, not something that happened yesterday, but something that grew in his head that ended up getting to him.
But what happened after that is the illustration of that idea that I am trying to give you : We gathered, and make it so that it never happens again. Stephen is part of us, the entity that we have become. We can’t succeed without him, and will not let him behind. In the end most of us went to sleep at 12AM, after long talks, hugs, and mental-screwdriving.
To whoever want to join the bootcamp with any other idea that the one I am describing in here : You shall not pass. This is teamwork, and without that, none of you will pass. That is a fact, well known by those who succeeded as well as those who did not.
You will NEED brothers and sisters.
Battleship & Sudoku
I already took too much of your time so I will try and be fast on this one but : Yesterday somebody pointed me in a new direction for sudoku solving. It is called Dancing Links. I won’t explain in details, especially since I don’t think I have a good enough grasp on this, but my goal here is to try and solve the 170 puzzles I solved in 8.5 seconds, but in less than a second this time. I’ll tell you more when I can.
And about Battleship : A few of us finished the challenge that said we had to make a battleship game in Ruby. We thought we could share that knowledge, so we got an idea and we are organizing a Battleship contest. We will build a core game, and a way for people to develop their players behaviors. We will be around the whole way and help those who could not finish it at first. Then after that we will just compete… But then again, we don’t have the rules yet so… See you tomorrow!