Coding Bootcamp Week 1: ALPHA Camp (Singapore)
And so I begin my journey into the world of programming. I have contemplated on this decision for awhile and finally decided to take a leap of faith into the relative unknown. We’ll see what happens. But for now, I am hopeful.
I enrolled in a 3-months coding bootcamp at ALPHA Camp. The first week at ALPHA camp was an eventful one: meeting awesome classmates from diverse backgrounds, all self-driven to learn to code. It was really nice to be able to thrive and learn in such an environment. The instructors were clear and detailed and the staff at ALPHA camp were all friendly and helpful.
As part of our curriculum, we have to create a blog to journal our learning on a weekly basis. This serves to allow us to reflect and consolidate our learnings. We were advised to adopt an ORID structure. Objective, Reflective, Interpretive, Decisional.
1. Objective: What did you do this week?
First things first: Setting up our laptops to install Ruby on Rails.
Ruby will be the programming language covered in this bootcamp. We jumped right into learning the language on the very first week. Bootcamp materials were given to watch and read to kickstart our learning. Being completely new to Ruby, I spent the entire week trying to digest information from reading, watching and doing Ruby exercises.
What I love about Ruby is how clean it is without much of the colon/semi-colons/brackets etc which is required for other languages. It’s also easy to understand since most of the code you read and write is much closer to English than other programming languages.
The assignment for the first week was a set of Leetcode exercises which were tough at first glance but doable with trusty help from Google, DevDocs and useful gems. Gems are gems indeed (pun intended).
The instructor introduced Codewars and encouraged us to do a 1–2 challenges each day to train our programming muscles. Tried it and it’s fun! But it gets progressively more…
