A Day in the Life of A [Junior] Makersquare Student
Tuesday, Aug 19th (Week 6)
Makersquare's tough. There's a reason it's called developer bootcamp. But every day has a pace.
7:45AM
I roll out of bed.
8:15AM
I take my adorable but noisy border collie, Brodie, out for a short walk. My husband, who is a developer and small business owner, sets his own schedule and is still asleep. I say farewell to my pup (who is cursed with the cone of shame right now!). Poor little guy.
By 8:20AM I'm rushing out the door. Sometimes I bike to class, but recently I’ve enjoyed walking. It affords time to reset my thoughts and prepare for the day at hand.
I’ve been walking past these construction workers on my way to the Capital. A few weeks ago their scaffolding fell on top of a car I was walking right next to, and the workers were dangling off the side of the building in their harnesses! It was terrifying!
My route to Makersquare’s junior classroom on Brazos and 8th takes me through the Capital. This is awesome, because the grounds are beautiful. It also serves as a daily reminder that I’m so glad my husband and I moved back to my hometown.
A rare selfie! I never take selfies.
The entrance to the capital overlooks this our great city all the way down to south congress. A majestic overseer indeed.
I take time to stop by LavAzza, one of my favorite morning spots, for a croissant, fruit, and coffee.
Makersquare is busy and intense and it’s important to take time doing things that aren’t related to computers or design or work. So I purposefully try to slow my morning. I don’t have a whole lot of time before class starts, but I manage to squeeze in a few pages of Walden. The more time I spend in front of a computer, the more I feel a tug to disconnect in order to inject some sense of balance.
I walk into class just before we delve into front-end lessons.
From 9-10 we go over students’ answers to a Javascript Euler assignment and I eat my breakfast somewhat awkwardly, because no one else seems to eat breakfast in class as loud as I. By 11 we’re finishing up a javascript object-oriented assignment (or other internet-y things). I finish a little early and take some time to review Angular.js on my own by watching some videos. I also take every chance I can get to catch up on email and the design world through my Feedly account.
12PM - For the first time I order Chipotle online, which is right down the street, and zip over to pick up a burrito bowl. It’s super convenient to just grab my lunch with my name on it at the pick-up window! Gone are the days when I would take a full lunch break because now I find myself, like other students, eating in front of my screen.
1PM - Another selfie! My friend Brian and I lounge on the couches during lunch.
3PM - From lunch till now we’ve worked on created a chat app using Angular. I’m feeling a little brain-dead, So it’s definitely time for a break. It’s hot hot hot outside, so I cannot drink the hot coffee that’s on auto brew throughout the whole day (nor can I comprehend how my classmates can drink it!). I walk over to Royal Blue with Chris, Quin, Derek, and Emma for an iced Americano (refreshing!).
By 4:30PM most of us are finished early, and people are already breaking out the beer and starting to relax for the day. Most of the talk around the class concerns the upcoming Cohort 7’s open house night. It's the night our experience at Makersquare culminates to, where students show off their senior projects to the Austin community and prospective employers. All of the buzz is a reminder that in less than a week our cohort (C8) will be on the senior side at Congress, beginning our final projects. Sooner than we expect, we shall be standing in their shoes.
These thoughts are both exciting and stressful, two feelings that are easily mitigated by some ping-pong (enter Justin and Patrick, our algorithms instructor). I shall miss the ping-pong table on the senior side!
By 6PM it’s time to get home. Most people are staying for the ATX Sass meetup, but my husband and I had made plans weeks ago for dinner with a dear friend. I walk home a slightly different way than I came, admiring how green Austin is this summer.
After dinner the Zadrozny house is fairly exhausted. Instead of working late into the night I try to get to bed by 11:30-12 so I will be wide awake and ready to take on the next day. The life of a developer is always one where, for the most part, you must protect your brain and comprehension. I want to give my faculties the best chance of easily grasping difficult and very abstract concepts. More than ever before in my life I find myself becoming more and more protective of my sleep. My husband Nick appreciates this value shift tremendously!
Six weeks fly fast. The days of prework hacking and laboring to make sense of objects seem a thousand miles away. The knowledge that every learning curve leads to better understanding and more powerful tools is a powerful perspective in a world where I am always aware of how much I know and how much I do not know. My teachers are awesome and make things a lot easier than they would be otherwise, and every day I'm here is one I'm thankful for. If you are interested in Makersquare, you should absolutely learn more and do it!
Tomorrow is a day of back-end with Nick, our ruby instructor, diving into Active Record! But that's for tomorrow. Tonight, we sleep.
