Wasted Days?

I want to share my experience of the last couple of days on the Makers Academy Ronin course. It's been a very difficult time and I hope by putting this out there I may be able to help others who hit that wall of frustration and feel it's just not worth it. 

Because it really, really is!

The last 48 hours of the Makers Academy Ronin course have been the most frustrating couple of days I've experienced. By Tuesday afternoon the constant barrage of problem after problem finally got the better of me, and I admit I was pretty pissed off with the whole Makers approach to teaching/learning.

I'm not going to go into all the issues apart from to say I've spent two days STUCK!

Of course I'd been stuck before, but nothing like this. Most, well really all of the problems came about because I am doing the course on Nitrous - coding in the cloud. It hadn't really been an issue so far. I usually have to google a few additional steps to get things to run, but I was used to that. I really like Nitrous, having everything on the one screen works for me.

But this week Nitrous didn't want to play. And it wasn't just me who was having trouble. The guys doing the course on Linux were experiencing similar issues.

Two days of  - Googling. Trying. Failing. Googling. Trying. Failing. And repeat to fade...

Two days without getting past Step 0 of the week's challenge. Very very frustrating.

Of course we asked our tutor for help, and some came, but not instantly and not anywhere near as much as I felt I should be getting. We were always asked to theorise why the problem was happening. But I didn't want to offer a theory as to why things weren't working - I just wanted them working!!! I wanted to get on with the challenge and not fall behind. We were constantly reminded that problem solving is a major part of web development, and we should be pleased that we were solving some issues. But the mindset I was in, I couldn't see that at all. I just felt that I'm paying for this course and I can't do the bloody thing as I can't install the gems/software needed, and if I do I can't get then to talk to each other or work properly, and we're largely being left on our own to find out why.

We were told that the offline guys were not having these issues - mainly because they are all using macs! Well bully for them! It was no consolation, and I think it just pissed me off a little bit more. I can't afford to rush out and buy a mac so this is the only option I have.

By the time of the Tuesday afternoon standup I'd just about had it, and by 5pm I checked out still at Step 0! Feeling I'd wasted two days.

After dinner I sat back at my laptop. Still a bit pissed, I had no intention of coding instead I thought I'd catch up on my woefully neglected blog as I have half a dozen posts scribbled on paper that I needed to write up. Once opened I looked back at a blog post I'd written on Day 1 of the course. I re-read something that really hit home. It was something we were told...

For the vast majority of this course we will be stuck!

And that's OK. Because a developer spends his day solving problems, some of which have likely never been tackled by anyone else before. It's the job.

I realised that for the last two days I'd basically been working more in line with how, I assume, an actual web developer would most likely be working. He hasn't got anyone there to hold his hand through a challenging issue, all he has is his ability to search for answers by offering the correct questions.

Here's the real challenge though. And it involves changing your mindset towards this unique learning experience.

As I said I'm paying for this course, so naturally you want to get as much out of it as you can, and naturally if you aren't progressing it's easy to feel as if you're wasting both your time and money. I think that's where all my frustrations were coming from, as if I'd been working for a company I'd have come out of the previous 48 hours feeling as if I'd really really earned my pay, as even though new problems arose, I had fixed multiple issues that were absolute bastards!


I suddenly got it. Being able to theorise the exact nature of the problem, being able to break it down into smaller issues (rather than googling a specific error message which is likely not going to offer results) and methodically attack them one at a time is a huge step towards success. Makers aren't getting us ready for an exam, they are getting us ready for a career as a web developer. And I knew that, or at least I'd read and been told that. But again, it's quite natural to get frustrated with the system if you feel that the person you're paying to teach you something isn't actually teaching you something. But Makers is not traditional learning. Our tutor would be doing us no favours by constantly jumping in, waving a magic coding wand (I want one of them) and fixing things, because in a couple of months time when the course is finished who would we call then? What do I say in an interview when asked how I'd solve a problem? "Er, I'd call Sam?".

If anything my two "wasted days" had potentially been the two most important days of the course so far.

I willfully neglected my blog again and spent three hours problem solving. Maybe it was my switch in mindset, I don't know, but I ended Tuesday night with everything set-up and working. I completed all of the first stage of the challenge. The program racked up fine, and I deployed to Heroku.

Heroku didn't want to play. And I was stuck again!

And you know what? That's fine. I went to bed looking forward to solving it in the morning. (And I did).

I'm approaching every day now with the philosophy that there will be problems. Many of them will be utter bastards. But I'll end each day having beaten some of them in to submission. Whether that's here on the Makers Academy Ronin course or in a career as a web developer.

Excursion on the Version!

I've found week 2 of the Makers Academy pre-course has been a lot more straightforward than week 1, mainly because 90% of the issues I had last week were caused by 'not having a mac'. After I'd sorted all the ins and the outs of using Nitrous as a coding platform it's all been going OK (famous last words!!!). I mean, it's still a challenge, but I feel less stressed with it all and am really enjoying the learning process.

So what have we been learning about? Well, Version Control, which is the management of changes to code, documents, computer programs, and other collections of information. We've been using Git locally on our computers and the web service GitHub to push/pull our code to - which is essentially backing it up and accessing it remotely.

Version Control is something I'd never used before, or even heard of, so it's been very enlightening. One of the most useful things this week was the Git Immersion course in which we found out all about Branching, using Alias', and being able to collaborate on each others codes via GitHub.

In short, I'm no expert but I'm finishing the week feeling quietly confident that I understand what we're supposed to right now. Which must be good, right? Plus with pretty much everything we've done this week I can see how useful it'll all be for any future projects (and hopefully career).

Roll on week 3...

A Journey Into Coding - The Beginning

Hello

It's Friday. 5 days into the Makers Academy pre-course. It's been a week where at times I've stared at the screen wanting to pull my hair out. It's been a week where at times I've thought about smashing my laptop against the wall. It's also been a week where I've punched the air with delight as a challenge I thought I'd never complete comes together nicely. It's also been a week where every single day I've woken up and the first thing I've thought about is coding. 5 days into the Makers Academy pre-course and I'm an addict.

I've always been fascinated with what goes on behind the scenes of computer games and apps. I'd mastered Sinclair Basic, on my old ZX Spectrum, what feels like 150 years ago now! Life then got in the way of computing, but when I had the chance I taught myself HTML just because it was something I wanted to learn. I mainly used the Dummies guide books, but also started looking at the page source of various websites to figure out how they achieved certain things. I then took that knowledge and adapted it for my own purposes, and although at no point in time have I ever considered myself to be anywhere near professional, I have built several sites for myself, family members and friends.

After discovering Scratch I lost weeks coding with it, and followed several online guides to learn as much as I could about it. I've moved onto several other languages, including dabbling in a little Java programming, some Visual Basic, and PHP/MySQL, and again this was all from reference guide books. I loved it all, and wanted to learn more. More than that though, I felt this was something I could see myself doing for the remainder of my working days.

My wife had mentioned Makers Academy to me some time back, someone she knew had quit their well paying job to go on a three month coding course, and they loved it. I knew Makers Academy was based in London, and I didn't realistically think that I could be there 5 days a week for three months, but they recently launched an online coding course, Makers Academy Ronin, and it seemed perfect for me.

It's not a qualification course. There are no certificates upon completion. They don't teach you to pass exams. Instead they teach you the skills you need to become a developer. You are immersed in an intense 60 hour week (and the rest) for 12 weeks, getting you where you need to be as an entry level developer.

Makers Academy are super selective too. I guess you need the right mindset for both coding and this kind of intense course. After applying I was sent about 20 hours worth of material to go through, and about 3 days to do it in. Turns out I knew a lot less than I thought I did, but I got there and loved every minute. I then had my interview and was over the moon when I was accepted onto the July 2015 Ronin cohort.

 

As I said at the beginning, it's day 5 of a 4 week pre-course. I thought it would be a nice gentle introduction to how things are done. I was wrong. You can kiss your old life goodbye, you belong to coding now.

This week has largely been about learning how to use the command line, something I'd never really used until I received the interview material. To say I've learned a lot is an understatement. The course itself, from what I've seen of it so far, is really well designed. Increasing in difficulty gradually, with tasks that get you referring to earlier segments, meaning that you really do start to understand areas which at first seemed baffling. 

However, I am already a little concerned about falling behind. I've encountered so many issues because, unlike most other people on the course, I don't have a mac. I think half of my time this week has been lost to troubleshooting problems like this. But I guess it's good to get all these things out the way at the beginning.

I'm now coding in the cloud on Nitrous, which in itself took some time to get the hang of. I've set up and connected my github, and started pushing commits to it (I'm still getting the hang of much of the terminology, so forgive me if I get it wrong).

I've learned more in these 5 days than I ever could've believed possible just a week ago. I've certainly not mastered everything from the materials, but I'm quite determined to. 5 days in and I am absolutely hooked.

Now I must stop. There is coding to be done...