Today was mock assessment day. Although it is mentally draining to go through the mock assessment, I really love it! You get to really test yourself with what you think you have learned and what you actually have learned. It is hard to tell where you are with the material because of the pair programming you need to do everyday except Wednesdays. I personally got a little too dependent on having a partner, and today’s assessment proved that to me.

Part 1: Sinatra and ActiveRecord

For the first challenge, we needed to create a many-to-many association between users and skill. “Great,” I thought to myself. “I wrote a blog post on this and I should be able to breeze through this!” However, I found myself struggling a little.

1. What exactly are you doing when you are creating associations with the tables?
2. What exactly is the difference between get and post?
3. How do you deal with the join table?

I found myself asking these three questions during the challenge. I timeboxed the challenge for one hour before moving onto the second challenge. I told myself that I would answer these questions after finishing for day and returning home.

Part 2: CSS Layout

I didn’t even look at this challenge. The reason why is because I don’t want to spend too much time on CSS. In my opinion, I think that ActiveRecord, Sinatra, Javascript, jQuery, and AJAX are all much more important than CSS to completely understand right now. In addition, although it’ll be hard for me to study these topics outside of DBC, CSS is something I feel like I can continue to study very easily without guidance from the instructors.

Part 3: jQuery & AJAX

Well, awesome! I spent all of yesterday on one challenge, “Lucky AJAX”. Although I don’t have a complete understanding of AJAX just yet, I was confident enough to research quickly on what I needed to do for this challenge. For this challenge, students needed to create a Simple Simon Says.

Part 4: Object Oriented JavaScript

To be honest, I am very disappointed with myself for not getting this challenge. I studied Javascript very hard for the past week, and was surprised I didn’t understand how to initialize in Javascript. This challenge has been in my thoughts all day, and I am determined to solve it ASAP!

Today’s lightning talk: CoffeeScript

After the assessments, I was pretty drained out. I ate some cereal real quickly, and continued to work on my presentation: CoffeeScript. I guess some people were looking forward to my presentation because of how I tried to make it real fun last week, but unfortunately I was going for a different approach. Of course I want to keep the presentation as fun as possible, but I wanted to expose my fellow cohort members to an alternative language to JavaScript; I wanted to pique their curiosity just enough for them to go off and google CoffeeScript themselves. The reason why I took this approach was that I realized how much material I would have needed to cover for CoffeeScript; it was a lot of material to cover in 4-5 minutes. Therefore, my plan was to go over the pros of CoffeeScript and give some examples of how CoffeeScript makes Javascript so much easier. And after my presentation, if students were curious enough to research CoffeeScript themselves, I would consider that a successful presentation!

Wander wander

After the lightning talks were over, there was a lot going on at Dev Bootcamp today. There was a new teacher that gave a talk on deploying an app to Heroku, Craack Your Code event, and a guest speaker that discussed Rails. Therefore, my fellow cohort members and I didn’t do much of the afternoon challenges. We discussed the assessment earlier this morning, and theories on how the event tonight was going to be. In addition, my youngest brother Johnny came back from Germany and my parents planned a nice dinner together. He was there working as a second lieutenant after graduating from West Point. Therefore, I decided to just leave early for the day; although coding is my passion and life for the past couple of months, family always comes first!