Oh no! Today was the first day in which I slept through my alarm! I woke up at 7:40AM when I should have woken up at 6:30AM. I quickly got ready and ran like I never ran before, crossed the GW Bridge, and took the A train, and ran to the building. With my heart beating for its life, I entered the building by 8:55AM. Integrity? Check.

Phase_2 filters out a lot of downtime from coding. Besides the AM/PM lectures, everyone is just working hard, coding through the challenges. Today, the challenge was on many-to-many relationships and using ActiveRecord/Sinatra to map out the associations. “Are you serious?” I thought to myself. “My lightning talk is on many-to-many relationships!” It’s as if the gods have favored me today! I proudly pulled up my blog post on it and helped my pairing partner understand how we should map the associations.

Time quickly passed and it was already lunch time. Guess where my friends and I went to? Tres Carnes?!?! There’s the cult that’s forming in our cohort because we eat there too much. It’s fun to have a common ground with everyone so we can all joke around collectively. I feel like this is imporatant because we all would be spending 9 weeks of our lives together, learning code.

Preparing for my lightning talk

Five minutes before lunch ended, I quickly wrote notes on the whiteboard on what I wanted to go over my lightning talk. I wanted to be prepared so hopefully at least one student could learn something from me. In addition, I didn’t want to waste time writing anything on the board while presenting. While each student before me gave his/her lightning talk, my stomach started to drop. I told myself that I would be presenting in front of friends, so I shouldn’t get this nervous. Three students until my turn. Two students until my turn. It was hard to focus on the lightning talks being given because I was very nervous. Looking back at it, I think I may have took the lightning talk too seriously. One student before my turn. I took a deep breath and went up to the whiteboard when my name was called.

Victory

I started going through my notes while turning the whiteboard to show the notes I have previously prepared. Everyone laughed. “That’s a good start,” I thought to myself. I modified my talk to use the database schema from the challenge this morning so everyone could relate to the talk a little bit more. The four minutes flew by and felt like only thirty seconds. The students responded well to my talk, and I was very happy!

So why are we spending so much time doing lightning talks?

Our cohort instructor told us the reason why we are having these lightning talks is because we are able to practice our public speaking and learn about the topic we choose a little bit more. I had a little talk with the instructor and basically told him how awesome of an idea this was, especially since we will all present our final projects to potential employers, friends, and cohort mates in six weeks. I took his advice to heart and tried my best to practice my public speaking on a topic I was shaky about. The instructor and I discussed how even if a final project is really awesome and should blow everyone out of the water, it really doesn’t matter if the project is presented poorly.

Bright future ahead

After the PM lectures, we all quickly went back to the challenges. I coded with my partner as best as I could, and called it a day when I felt my body starting to burn out by 7:15PM. Therefore, I called it a day and went home. Although I was frustrated by how little I knew about Sinatra and ActiveRecord, I feel like I am slowly starting to understand them. I’m excited!