Week 5
Day 1
Today we reviewed our Bootstrap challenge from the weekend and also had a Bootstrap snap challenge in the morning. So, a lot of bootstrap, but I’m getting the hang of it.
We also had an intro lecture on REST APIs. This included talking about ways that a client and server exchange the needed information. We talked about how cookies work, verifying sessions and the parts of urls.
In the evening I got a start on actually coding my personal web project. I’m pretty excited to be putting my new skills to work.
Day 2
I spent the morning setting up unit tests for our group project. I was able to get the most basic possible test to run so I felt really good about just getting the framework for the testing setup.
I took the afternoon off to figure out my car situation since my car was totalled last week. I ended up buying the same model of car, a year older and a few more miles but well-cared for.
Day 3
Today included coach meetings. Three times during the 10 week bootcamp all students have a meeting with the success/career coach and another meeting with one of the instructors. My meetings today provided me with some good insights and a few sort of meta things to ponder.
Day 4
REST APIs Part 2
This morning was a lecture about REST APIs. Earlier this week we did an overview. Today we expanded on that and started looking at the actual code.
For our group projects, we’ll have a REST API that allows our front-ends to get and return information to our back-ends.
Day 5
Assessment 1
Today we had one of two assessments for the class. It was four hours of coding away and I felt good that I got all of my code to run correctly. (Two days later it suddenly occurred to me that I had limited a couple of my database fields to a certain number of characters but had failed to make my code check the number of characters for those fields before sticking records in the database. Hopefully whoever grades it doesn’t notice.)
Afternoon Pro Dev
Our afternoon professional development included a couple of interesting talks from bootcamp alumni.
One was from a married couple – the husband had taken the Java/Android bootcamp and the wife had taken the digital media bootcamp. It was interesting to hear their stories and how they had found jobs and worked on their own business.
The second talk was from a guy that had started a company with another bootcamp graduate and grown the company for a few years before selling it and moving on to work for a startup. This guy is sort of a legend around the bootcamp for having successfully started and sold a company. But he was not at all what I was expecting.
He didn’t seem businessy or suave. He seemed nerdy, interesting and like he really cares about other people. He talked about his random interests growing up. It was clear that he hadn’t been in business to make money. He’d been doing it to create something cool. He was proud of having played a role in providing paychecks for his employees- money that went for them to travel or pay their mortgages. His number one concern about selling his business was making sure that all of his employees were taken care of through the process. So cool.