Josh learns to code

Blogging 12 weeks of Makers Academy

[joshcodes-blog1]

Makers Academy Week 3: "Sinatra has ended his set"

After 2 weeks of relative comfort in plain old Ruby, we were thrown in at the deep end and asked to give a shiny web interface to our previously terminal-bound and text-based Battleships game. 

Our tools of the trade? First and foremost, we had to learn a new testing framework to drive our development. Whilst RSpec has been excellent for unit-testing the classes and methods we've wrote so far, it's not so useful for testing that a webpage behaves in the way you want it to.

Out with TDD, in with BDD...

With behaviour driven development in mind, we started writing some Cucumber feature specs, which interestingly are plain English tests that describe exactly what the test suite should look for and what it expects to see.

Under the hood of our clean and neat feature specs, are slightly less friendly looking Capybara steps. All of our Cucumber features delegate to Capybara instructions that power our tests.

The final key part of our application was the Ruby framework itself, Sinatra. Sinatra is a lightweight framework that gives Ruby some server super-powers. I'm not entirely sure I understand what magic it's performing to let us play battleships in the browser, but all will hopefully become clear soon enough.

Next week, More Sinatra, and hello databases...

[joshcodes-blog1]

Makers Academy Day 7: Battleships

Someone asked me today how I'd summarise my time at Makers 2 weeks in. If I had to sum it up, I'd say it was the single most challenging, yet incredibly rewarding and interesting thing I could be doing right now. It's a real emotional rollercoaster of feeling like a genius one minute when you write a line of code that you feel is the best it can be, then the next that line is breaking all of your tests, despite being 'right'. 

In the weekly projects and challenges so far, there's been an almost welcome element of handholding through the exercises. We've had to design the domain model for our Boris Bikes and Airport projects, but we've had guidance on laying out the classes and areas to focus on.

Today was the first real shift away from that guidance. We were asked to design and implement a two player battleships game, built using the SOLID principles:

Single responsibility principle - Classes should only have one responsibility

Open/Closed principle - Software entities should be open to extension, but closed to modification

Liskov Substitution Principle - Objects in a program should be directly replaceable with instances of their sub-types.

Interface Segregation Principle - Many client-specific interfaces are better than one general purpose interfaces.

Dependency Inversion Principle - Depend on abstractions, not on concretions.

It will be interesting to see how closely we can adhere to these principles - I can imagine it being quite difficult to think about structural code architecture principles when we're knee deep in failing tests and typos.

[joshcodes-blog1]

Makers Academy Day 6: Makers 2.0!

Today marks Makers first day in its brand new offices on Commercial Street! It has pretty much everything a good startup office needs... Exposed brick walls, mezzanine in the loft area, industrial-style lighting. It's also a far better place to learn. No longer will you be in danger of getting hit by a ping pong ball mid-line of code. The staff live in the balcony at the top, both cohorts on the third floor, and dedicated lecture space, future meeting rooms, and a full sized kitchen on the second floor.

"There's so much space for activities!"

Mondays at Makers consist of going over weekend challenges with a coach, though today it also consisted of working out how to stop the fire escapes trapping everyone in the building. I was pretty happy with my weekend challenge, in which we had to build out the classes for an airport simulation. It might have took me most of Friday afternoon and half of Saturday - but I was happy with the finished product none the less.

Code reviews with a coach are an interesting experience. It's a vital skill to have to be proud and able to defend your code, but also to let go of it when your coach has you remove 6-7 lines of code that took you most of an evening, in favour of a one-line method that does exactly the same thing.

Technically tomorrow is the start of our Battleships project, but most of us started discussing it today. It's amazing how a seemingly simple game can start to be so complex when you break it down into chunks you can code. Within the 'board' you have a player board, an opponent board, a player board that tracks their hits on an opponents board and vice versa.

Tomorrow, we start putting Battleships together...

[joshcodes-blog1]

Makers Academy Day 5: Come fly with me

A temporary change in pace came today when my routine 12 hours at Makers was cut to just 4, but for the best of reasons: Makers Academy is leaving it's home at Epworth house for a brand new shiny office.

It's been common knowledge that this move was coming since we started the course, but interestingly it felt strange leaving the place for the last time after becoming an all-consuming part of my life for the last week. I wonder if the senior cohort and team feel similarly?

The reasons for Makers office move are apparently twofold. Firstly, every tenant had to be out today, as Epworth House is being drastically remodelled, some parts of it demolished entirely, I gather. We seemed to be leaving right at the last minute of the buildings life, I passed several demolitions teams making a start at the top of the building.

Secondly, Makers has drastically outgrown the office it started in many months ago. Lecture space doubles as ping-pong and karaoke space. It wasn't unusual to have to dodge a rogue ping-pong ball mid-way through a line of code. The senior cohort are crammed into the boardroom to have their lectures as there is simply nowhere else for them to go. The boardroom also masquerades as a yoga & meditation studio.

By a pure stroke of luck, I've rented a room that is quite literally across the road from the shiny new office on Commercial Street. I'm both entirely okay with having the shortest commute in all of London, and a tiny bit bummed that I lose my 15 minute walk each day - I've found it to be great thinking time and a good way to transition from 'Makers mode' to 'home mode'.  I'll have to think of some other way to keep that distance.

As we had to be out of the office by 12, a group of us went for lunch, both to talk about our weekend challenge and to get to know one another a little better. I hope there are more opportunities to do this as it was a welcome change of pace from the intensity of the last few days.

Weekend Challenge: Implement an airport simulation, with planes, landing, taking off, weather conditions, and developed in a test driven way. With no walkthrough - eek! Time to see how much of this week has sunk in...

[joshcodes-blog1]

Makers Academy Day 4: Bye Boris!

Thursday marks our third and final day pairing on Boris Bikes, our first weekly project. It's the first real chance I've had to reflect on where we started and where we are now.

6 months ago I couldn't have imagined being able to design and implement a complete system of working and broken bikes, docking stations to hold and release them, garages to fix them, and vans to transport them around. Last week I couldn't have imagined being able to do that. Despite constant feelings of being way behind other pairs, I'm completely surprised by how much seems to have sunk in without my noticing it.

One small but significant win was based on what coaches Sam and Steve mentioned in our afternoon lecture - think about what you want to do in plain English, and there will nearly always be a built in Ruby method that will get you most of the way there, it's just a case of finding it in Ruby's excellently extensive documentation.

This really clicked for me when I found a method that allowed us to refactor from 8 or 9 lines of sort-of working code that does unmentionable things to our bike objects to take them out of the van, to simply being able to call bikes.clear with the exact same result. The documentation is definitely going to be on my reading list for the weekend.

Tomorrow: Weekend Challenge 1!

[joshcodes-blog1]

Makers Academy Day 3: Breaking down brick walls?

It's been an interesting one at Makers this Wednesday. My pairing partner and I started off our project making great inroads through the material, taking the time to understand each piece of our Boris Bikes task as it came along, and only implementing things when we'd talked them out beforehand to reach a consensus.

The difference between productivity on Tuesday and Wednesday is perhaps best conveyed through the number of github commits I made:

Tuesday: 11 commits.

Wednesday: 2 commits.

There are a few reasons for this. Firstly, I have Stage 4 Man Flu, and I fear my days may be numbered. Secondly, a drunk driver thankfully decided to give up his criminal activities at 3.30am in the morning. Right outside my flat. Whilst mildly intriguing listening to the police chase down and arrest this man, I really wish he'd chosen to give himself up a few hundred yards further up the road. Very little sleep is definitely not conducive to a hard days coding.

Perhaps our biggest issue of all were the brick walls we seemed to keep encountering. We've learned enough about Ruby and testing with rspec to implement the structured walkthrough for the first half of our Boris Bikes, but when it came to the free-form exercises, we found ourselves coming up against points where we couldn't find a way to move forward. When we're so new to Ruby, it can be really hard to take what's in our head or on paper, and parse that into functional Ruby code.

I think a good look at the Ruby documentation is in order tonight, as I'm almost certain some of the things we've pieced together with brittle tests and verbose code can be achieved with far simpler conventional Ruby methods.

Takeaway from Day 3: The Ruby documentation is your coding bible. Use it, learn it, love it!

[joshcodes-blog1]

Makers Academy Day 2: Boris Bikes!

Today was all about the red and green rollercoaster of rspec, Ruby's most popular testing framework. My experience with it in the past extends to the heady heights of ensuring that 3 divided by 3 doesn't leave a remainder in FizzBuzz, so it was both fun and daunting to be thrown in to develop a proper project (based on the London Barclays Cycle Hire system) using test driven development (TDD). 

If there's one takeaway from today it's that watching your tests fail over and over again is the most frustrating thing when you simply don't know why, and have little experience to draw on to figure it out, but it is such a great 'small win' when everything suddenly turns green and you've nailed it. I definitely prefer driving development with tests than the way we learnt in the PreCourse, simply blindly hacking functionality into the student directory project.

The other new concept introduced to us today was pair programming. I can honestly say that pair programming was one of the things I was most apprehensive about before joining Makers. I've always been the type to prefer getting stuck in and ploughing through material quietly by myself, so the idea of spending whole days working with another person was a daunting one for me.

After a couple of hours trying to ensure everything was set up right, my partner and I finally got started with an afternoon's pairing. I'm happy to admit that my initial concerns were totally unfounded. We definitely both had strong opinions on how the code should be written, sometimes in agreement, other times completely differing, which in theory sounds like a nightmare to work through -- What we actually end up with is bloody good code! 

The keys to good pairing seem to be respect, maintaining driver/navigator roles, and switching them often. If you or your partner have two completely different ideas, the best thing to do is to let each other explain, explore, and fight for their method. It isn't important who's code worked, or who got what into the repository - What matters is that the best ideas of 2 minds are at least twice as good as the best of one, and explaining yourself to your pair partner is a great way to internalize what you're learning.

Onto day 3...

[joshcodes-blog1]

Makers Academy Day 1: Through the first day...

A little under 2 months since I got offered a place at Makers, I thankfully have no regrets after completing my first day here. I arrived in a little before 9, and got chatting to a few new people from my cohort I recognised from the open day & graduation ceremony on Friday - Definitely get yourself to one of those if you're weighing up applying to Makers.

The day was very loosely structured around an introductory session in the morning, and a short informational session in the evening, with a lot of free time in the middle.

The morning session began with 'circle time' where we went around the circle introducing the people next to us, like all good 'get to know you' sessions in every organisation on the planet, ever. Despite my passionate hatred for, and inevitable feelings of awkwardness when, speaking in front of people, it wasn't nearly as cringe-inducing as those sorts of things normally are. It also helped with learning a few names of my new cohort-mates and coaches. Emphasis on a few... THERE ARE SO MANY NAMES.

The main bulk of the day was simply time to get setup with laptops, HipChat, and continue working on our precourse challenges, which were to be reviewed by a coach. I was particularly proud of my attempt at the  chatterbox challenge, extended with all the requirements and cleaned up quite nicely. It earned me my first sticker from Head Coach Sam, which is obviously the important thing.

After a talk by the operations team on upcoming events, talks, how to feedback to them, and talk of the new Makers office, the day was essentially over. I stuck around until around 7pm, by which time most people had left, refactoring what I'd been working on earlier in the day, and trying to get my 'FizzBuzz time' down from it's current 8 minutes to a personal target of 5.

Overall, a productive and positive first day, and very much looking forwards to starting to pair program and explore test driven development (TDD) tomorrow.

[joshcodes-blog1]

Makers Academy Day -2: Gradumas!

In just over 36 hours, I'll be starting my journey as a Junior Developer-in-training at Makers Academy, a 12 week intensive bootcamp for helping people start a career in technology.

I'm really looking forwards to finally getting started, after first applying way back in the Spring, when I didn't make it in - although disheartening at the time, it was completely the right call, I was really underprepared for the interview.

If you're reading this and thinking about joining Makers, don't make the mistake I did of just going through the basics of Ruby on Codecademy and expecting to be ready - go that bit further and get stuck into strings and simple data structures (arrays and hashes), play with them, break them, see how to work with them.

After that less-than-perfect first interview, I kept learning, and got accepted after a 5 minute technical test and chat with Jordan this October, to start this coming Monday - and yikes it's come around fast.

Over the last few weeks everyone in the cohort has been set a PreCourse, which I gather is a relatively new feature of Makers that used to form the opening few days of the course itself. You're expected to put in around 15-20 hours a week getting up to speed with using the command line, version control with git & GitHub, and learning the fundamentals of Ruby. It seems like a useful way to get everyone up to speed for Day 1, and it's definitely in your best interest to give it your all - the more you have learned before the course, the more productively you can spend your preciously short time at Makers.

In between getting to grips with the PreCourse, moving to London, and working my former job in a coffee lounge, I found time to attend the September cohort's graduation ceremony last night, showcasing what they have been working on for the last few weeks of their course. To say the projects were impressive would do them a huge disservice. From a built from scratch robot that took its directions from whatever you could tweet to it, to a notes tool that seamlessly 'flicked' your ideas from your phone to your desktop, whilst being built in a technology that's only a few weeks old.

It's a true testament to Makers Academy that such a wide community has developed around it - the offices were packed to capacity with current students, alumni, friends and family, hiring partners, and a few of my new cohort-mates also starting on Monday. I managed to meet a handful of them, all really pleasant people, who interestingly came from hugely varied backgrounds and career histories.

Roll on the last day of the PreCourse tomorrow, and I'm pumped to finally get started on Monday!