Becoming a Unicorn

(source:  Hackbright Academy)

It’s been amazing! and no, I am not exaggerating! 

First of all, I have never seen so many driven and bright women in one place.

Second, our instructors are super humans! I am not going to comment on their knowledge, simply because I won’t be able to do justice to it. But I will cover their other amazing skills - Christian is an artist and an extremely patient teacher who can break down the most convoluted concepts into hilarious drawings. Oh and the history lessons he gives us, make me question his age, he looks way too young. Liz and Cynthia are extremely carying women, without who I can’t imagine this place being as great as it is! Some of my favorite moments: when they share coding jokes or when they start debating on the benefits of one technology over the other :) 

So, what have I learned during the first week? To sum it up - everything you need to know to write a program and we wrote a bunch of small ones. We covered functions, loops, lists, dictionaries, conditionals, logic, test-driven development, version control, debugging. Object oriented stuff spilled over to the beginning of the second week and I will talk about it in the next post.

The first week project was to write a program that creates directories in your computer and moves 200 files in the respective directories based on the letter of the alphabet they start with. The biggest challenge was not to overcomplicate things. I go by this rule: “the code should be straight forward and simple, with as a few cartwheels as possible” - it prevents me from making mistakes that will be hard to debug later. 

I know I spent only one week with Python, but I love it. It’s straight forward with a minimum amount of extra syntax, such as semicolons, curly brakets and etc. It feels so much cleaner compared to Ruby and JS. Now, I cannot give my opinion regarding the conceptual and philosophical aspects of Python and how it relates to other languages, Yet; just give me a few weeks - I am already on it!

Was given some light reading by my instructor :) [pic] — path.com/p/3W98uJ

March 9, 2013

Here is a few cool resources I collected during the first week:

Tutorial on basics of Github 

Tutorial on more complicated things of Github

Tutorials on Python

Documentation on Python (go to place for any command you might need) - then you can search it on StackOverflow for examples.

So, this is the roundup of my first week. In the next post I will talk about the game I built during my second week…