Today, I finished my first week at the Bootcamp, and in Bootcamp style, we finished the week applying/implementing all that we have learned thus far in the most intense way possible - a (mini) Hackathon.
But more on that later.
Earlier in the week, we spent a lot of time on the importance of computational thinking, and on the importance of planning; a lot of code is solved way before any letter on a keyboard is pressed. I had these words drilled in my head, "the best of coders breakdown their problem before typing any syntax!" (nearly used a ` because of my newfound obsession with template literals!) - and was it drilled in my head!
Every week we have someone from the industry give us a talk. This week we had Joseph Trodden, the co-founder of C-Zero Ventures, give us an inspirational speech and tell us about our journey - The Hero's Journey.
Status quo, which is Latin for "The state in which" (I googled that don't worry), refers to the hero's (you and I) normal life. The hero usually receives a call to do better, and when they've answered the call, the hero goes through many stages, shifting from the ordinary world to the special world. After going through many stages including, meeting the right people and suffering through ordeals, they shift back to the normal world but at a higher plane than before. See more below:
The Hero's Journey Spiral © 2019 by Thea Cooke is licensed under Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International.
We then quickly went over HTML/CSS before we started JavaScript. Concepts were well explained and we had to quickly grasp them to cover the material and complete a few tasks to supplement what we had learned.
And then came the Hackathon.
I use the word Hackathon loosely because most of you reading this are somewhat aware of what a Hackathon is, the amount of coding required, and the length of time in which you are coding. But I didn't, still don't. We spent the day using loops, objects, arrays, functions, and more to try and create the classic Rock-Paper-Scissors game. You can find my take on the game [here]! (github.com/codingmohamed/rock-paper-scissor..)
Gon in a Janken pose. Janken is the Japanese equivalent of Rock-Paper-Scissors
More amazing than the fact that I could code AND that my code worked (I know what could be more amazing, but bear with me) was the 🌟PROCESS🌟. The computational thinking lectures stuck with me! I found myself breaking down the problem into smaller pieces and THEN using JavaScript to solve the code, rather than JavaScript solving me (I don't know but that phrase made sense to me).
Code, or more specifically, JavaScript was a tool that I used to solve my problem.
I had coded for a few months before, but embedding computational thinking in the way I code, has been a revelation. I found myself dealing with problems in a much more efficient and logical way.
But what stuck with me this week was the Hero's Journey. It resonates very much with me and I know it resonates with you - dealing with ordeals in the abyss and facing one's shadow self. But it's only through patience, hard work, and the support of allies (and maybe even enemies) that will allow us to go back to the ordinary world on a higher plane.
If we keep working, we will meet each other in the ordinary world, on a much higher plane.
If you're still reading, thank you so much, I hope to use this blog to post and share useful information I gain! - please connect with me on the following:
Twitter: @codewithmohamed
Github: github.com/codewithmohamed
LinkedIn: Mohamed Mohamud
Email: m.mohamud1992@gmail.com