From Omaha Code School

Blog posts about my time in Omaha Code School

March 5, 2014

Extracurricular Activities

I have talked a lot about what we have done in class recently, but I wanted to take a minute and talk about some of the things going on outside of the classroom. Sumeet and Rahul like to keep us on our toes and are always looking for opportunities to introduce us to new people. Here are some of the upcoming events we will be taking part in.

March 5th (Today) @ 6pm – Omaha Mobile Group
The Omaha Mobile Group is having a panel discussion on the benefits and drawbacks of Native vs Mobile Web vs Hybrid development. This group specifically reached out to OCS to make sure we knew we were invited. I think we might have a couple of people from class interested, but the number of people who show up will probably depend on how much homework we have tonight.

March 12th – Field Trip to Grain & Mortar
This is the first opportunity for our class to visit a startup in person. We will be touring Grain & Mortar‘s space, and talking with them about what they do. We are really looking forward to learning as much as we can during this time.

March 14th @ 4:30 – Open House at Omaha Code School
Omaha Code School is hosting an open house so that anyone interested can come see what we are doing. The event will go till 7:30pm and will have a little to eat, a little to drink, and a little to listen to. This will be a great chance to get to know the students, mentors, and instructors associated with OCS.

March 20th @ 5pm – Beer && Code
This is the first time another developer community will utilize our space at OCS. Beer && Code will be hosting their monthly meetup starting at 5pm. Developers from across the city get together for a tasty beverage and work on some code. If you code, grab your laptop and come out. Bring your own drinks to drink or share. Brix and Beertopia are nearby if you need to pick up something on the way.

March 2, 2014

One Week In

We have come a long way in a week. I started out not remembering the exact syntax for how to run a Ruby program. I felt a little silly, but we made it. Here is a look at some of the things we learned.

We started out small. We wrote a small program to keep track of pets for a humane society. Getting pet info from the user and storing it in an array so we could search and update stored values. It was a good first program to recall the skills we had learned during our prework.

We then moved on to a classroom management app. It read in a text roster, and helped create random groups for projects and homework. We had to learn how to read and parse a file, along with how to iterate through collections of data. It was also an opportunity to build on our understanding of Object Oriented Programming.

Then we hit a wall. We were tasked with scoring a game of bowling. That is a harder problem then it sounds. I had a really hard time figuring out what classes we needed and how to score spares and strikes. It was also the first program we tried to write using RSPEC and test driven development. This was by far the hardest program we had during the week, but we learned a lot.

Then it clicked. We wrote a Stock Portfolio application. We continued our Test Driven Development, and this time it just made sense. We were able to cruise through the assignment so quickly our instructor had to come up with more features for us to work on. It was an awesome feeling.

On Friday, we needed to play a game of Tic-Tac-Toe. It wasn’t so bad at first, until we got to artificial intelligence. Figuring out how to block a player from winning is harder than it sounds. We even had an opportunity for extra credit to modify our program to handle a board of any size. This was especially difficult, but we made it work.

Overall, I’m proud of the work we completed during the first week. I’m also looking forward to getting into web development with Sinatra next week.

February 27, 2014

Everything Clicked

Yesterday was horrible. I couldn’t wrap my head around the problem we were given for homework. I felt bad for my partner because I wasn’t much help. We couldn’t figure out which pieces we needed, let alone where they were supposed to go.

Today was the exact opposite. Once we received our assignment, I got it right away. My partner for the day was none other than Kaitlyn Hova. (Check out her website, she does amazing things!) We had a plan, and were on the same page right away.

We got to work and started writing our test cases. I should let you know that our instructor is trying to get us to use Test Driven Development for our assignments. That’s where you write a test before you write any actual code. It can be hard to understand at first, but totally made sense today. We were able to come up with about 20 tests for our program. As we changed something here or there a test that used to pass would fail, and that is a good thing. Since we had automated test cases that validated our entire program every time it ran, we knew instantly if our change broke another part of the program. We would find the issue and fix it so that our tests would pass again before moving on.

Since we were cruising, it didn’t take us long to finish our initial assignment. Unfortunately, we were sitting right next to our instructor. Every time he heard us mention that we were about done, he updated the assignment’s requirements to add something else. We barely skipped a beat and knocked them out too.

Today was one of the more satisfying days in my adult life. It feeds something deep inside and makes you want to wake up tomorrow and do it all again. I hope these days become more frequent in my life. They are awesome!

February 24, 2014

In The Beginning

Like any other first day, today was not without its surprises. As I drove to class, I had a silly grin on my face. It was something that I haven’t experienced in a long time. I simply cranked my stereo, sipped on my energy drink, and enjoyed the ride. I have been looking forward to this day for the last two months.

I rounded the corner from the parking garage and walked up to the door. I swung it open and looked inside. I could hardly believe what I saw. A big open space with high ceilings. Huge colorful art pieces that instantly grab your attention. As I forced myself to look away I spotted comfy couches, benches, tables and chairs filling the room. I can’t tell you how spoiled we are. As the rest of the class filed in behind me, I introduced myself and tried to remember names. We picked our seats, and pulled out our laptops. Bagels and coffee made sure that we got off to a good start.

As we got settled in we wen’t over some of the details. After the formal introductions were complete, we started the long, arduous task of adding the required software to our laptops. Luckily, Sumeet came with a plan. The class relies a lot on GitHub to backup and share the projects we will be working on. The same company has come up with a way to make sure teams have the same software loaded on their machines. They call it Boxen. It took a little massaging, but eventually we were ready to dive in.

Our first Ruby assignment had us pair programming right away. That’s where two developers work together on a project, but only use one computer. It’s an interesting way to work. It forces both developers to be involved and pay attention to what the other is doing. I have to admit that it works though. Both Cara, my awesome partner for this assignment, and I caught errors and typos that the other didn’t catch right away. As we sat on one of the plush couches, we made pretty good progress. Our instructor admitted that this first assignment was a bit of a stretch from what our prework had required, and he didn’t disappoint. Soon enough we ran into a problem. We knew what we wanted to do, but we didn’t know how to do it. We started looking through some notes, and quickly moved onto online forums and search engines. Unfortunately, this problem had us backed into a corner. We weren’t finding what we needed. Luckily, we had an entire room full of people to ask. As we described our problem to other students, we began hearing about options that we hadn’t even considered. It gave us enough to power through and get the job done.

As if all that wasn’t enough, today Silicon Prairie News announced that I am working with them to cover OCS. They are a technology blog that covers startups across the midwest. This is an opportunity to get as many people in our community aware of what we are doing this spring. For the initial post, I summarized some of the information from my blog so far. Specifically, the Questions post. Hopefully it helps get information out to those who have questions. I will continue to write a new post every-other week throughout the class, so keep an eye out and give them a read.

Even though today was short by Sumeet’s standards, I’m still wiped. There was so much excitement and energy today that I just got lost in the moment and needed to take a minute to catch my breath. I can’t help but think that I will be cranking my stereo and rocking out with a grin on my face on the way to class again tomorrow. Today was a great day.

February 24, 2014

Our Space

Here are some pictures that I took as I walked into our space at Omaha Code School. It HUGE and awesome. Comparisons have already been made to a Real World type space from MTV.