One of my cohort mates told me about this neato trick where if you highlight your Tumblr post text, you get this cool popup that lets you format it in a flash!!!
But I tried it just now and it doesn't work. :( So you're just getting boring text.
Today I got paired up with someone I got through Jumpstart with together. We studied through it together, and today we studied through the day together!
I approached the day, trying to do it the way Daniel recommended and hoping I'd get a knowledge pay. So how did go, you may say?
I think it went pretty well. Studying the solutions first and foremost and reading it over to myself helped me feel a little more confident about the start of lecture! :-) But I felt less comfortable about diving back into Rails/ActiveRecord. :-( Fortunately, my partner was All Good about taking our time and making sure we knew what we were doing, step by step, and asking Plenty of Questions? to poor Fred, who got the brunt of our queries.
Interestingly, we were shown a quick plan of what the rest of our class would be like, and how it'd culminate with the Capstone project. What made that so interesting is I went over all of the course curriculum to see when we did what for a sneak peek, and then I got a double peek as a result! Maybe I should try repeatedly to peek at practice assessments??
Things started out slow, but by the end of the day, I felt like I had a better grasp of ActiveRecord than when the day started. I still have difficulty piecing together how belongs_to, has_many, has_one work in terms of code, but I found that drawing a visual map with all the keys and showing what points where helps me manage that much better than just trying to go through it by code.
We started off with just practicing associations. We did this for a mock course enrollment project. I started off rusty, and gave Maurice the rustiest combluxactsionizably response when he asked about Course class's has_many relationship to Enrollment. He was simply just looking for that Enrollment belongs_to Course. :-(
I got better as the day went by, and we made it up to finishing Phase III of the URL Shortener project. One issue I have is my mind starts to wander off onto things that are not necessarily the point of the exercise, or should even matter to it. For example, our mock URL Shortener was going to return a randomized string created from Base64, and I ended up asking Fred if we had to format said string so that when the user got it back as the short URL, if it had to include "http://" or anything like that.
It's not that I think about the irrelevant things on purpose, but at the moment, it's what I consider and wonder how I'll work that in to our code because it seems like it'll be tricky - but as it stands, it's something I need to get myself to not think about because in this case, the exercise was just to get us practicing associations, migrating, and creating Models and tables - not creating a more complete app.
One thing I discovered though was upon going home and comparing solutions, the last revision on our repo was said to be at 2 PM.. which really stressed me out! It means that we somehow messed up a commit, because I remember committing several times after 2, but we were missing a lot of methods and even view.rb, which I noticed when I noticed how sparse our solution was compared to A/A's, and then it dawned on me something had gone very wrong. I just hope tomorrow, it's still there and not wiped out so I can push it properly! That was really upsetting and I didn't think I would let something like that happen.
I also talked to another cohort mate who I'd met a few weeks prior to the cohort start date, and we discussed how we'd approaching studying for the next assessment. We both still feel shaky on SQL, and I proposed on Saturday, we come in and do pair programming together through SQLZoo and the practice assessments we'll get to make sure we're more solid on it all. I think we're both at about the same level, in terms of what we struggle with, and how we approach things, so although we may end up getting stuck more than if one of us were much higher than the other, I think it'll be great for making sure we get our material down! I'll keep this blog... posted. :-)
Tomorrow we have to build a Poll app. It will just be study hall, so I don't know how I'll fare throughout the day. Taking it slower definitely helped a lot today, and I hope I can do more of the same tomorrow and feel ready for building our own custom ActiveRecord on Friday. I just feel I'm so slow sometimes, especially with certain concepts, and trying to sort it out in a way that I can easily understand. Maybe someday, I can write an App Academy For Dummies, publish it, and shelve it in my self.help section. :-)