Today was a bittersweet day for me. I am now a part of the senior cohort, the Red-Spotted Newts. The Great-Horned Owls is the new name of the new cohort coming in today. In order to prepare for their arrival, I headed over to the Dev Bootcamp space by 8:30AM.

Introductions

As a veteran of the space now, I cleaned the area with the other students. We all lined up the hall in order to welcome the Great-Horned Owls, and participated in ice breaker activities. This time was a little different because breakfast was served before sitting in a circle to introduce ourselves to everyone. When it was my turn to introduce myself, I gave a piece of advice along with my name. I told everyone how it was good to get close to your cohort mates, but what that subconsciously does to everyone is it creates a separation of students by which cohort the students are in. And once the separation becomes more and more apparent, the essence of the Dev Bootcamp community starts to fail. Therefore, I told everyone to reach out to students that aren’t in the same cohort and strike a conversation, or help out with any questions they may have. I feel like some responsibilities were put onto my lap as veteran of the space; I want everyone at Dev Bootcamp to strive to make the space an awesome place to be, surrounded by amazing people.

Prep talk to phase_2

After lunch, the Owls went off to do the introduction group activity and the Caterpillars and Newts got together to do intro sessions on Active Record, jQuery, AJAX, git workflow, and MVC. I volunteered to do the talk on Active Record since I gave one yesterday. One of the things I stressed was how important it is to setup the Active Record associations properly since most of the things in your code won’t work if not set up properly.

And here we go

After the introductions were all complete for the day, the Newts and I met a new instructor for our last phase. In addition, the cohort was split up into two groups. So while the first group went for lectures, my peer partner and I went off to work on Rails. After the first group was finished, I went for a lecture on git and git workflow. One of the arguments for learning git was how the industry worked hard to have git as the norm so it was going to be prevalent for at least another 9 to 10 years. The instructor told us a basic rule that he followed in order to determine how much longer a language was going to stay prevalent; however long the language was in use for would be how much longer it would last. As an example, he stated that because Rails was used for around 10 years, Rails would be used for 10 more years.

Out of fuel

I’m so exhausted these days to the point where I can’t work. I’m going to try to go to sleep early despite not being as comfortable with Rails as I want. I only have 3 more weeks of Dev Bootcamp left and it would be a shame to burn out before finishing strong. My mind wants to pull all nighters in order to catch up, but my body doesn’t want to let me. I hope this will only be temporary.