Week 3 down and wow it was a crazy week! I’m fairly certain my brain is just liquid sloshing around in my skull right now and I’m afraid to go to sleep in case it starts pouring out of my ears. This week, we covered an incredibly broad range of topics:

  • HTML and CSS (Geocities and Angelfire flashbacks — Hamster Dance, this is all that’s left of you…)
  • How the web works (still tubes, wires, and magic — but also requests and responses!)
  • Flask (aka “oh, so that’s how these things can work together”)
  • Boostrap (brought to you by designers who understood prime factorization)
  • Testing software

Yeah, that’s a lot. Also, we met our mentors this week and now I have three wonderful individuals I’m super excited to work with! We had Chinese food on the night of the Mentor Mixer and they left me with some excellent fortune cookie messages:

Now that I’ve gone through three weeks of Hackbright, I’ve settled into a pretty comfortable routine for myself. This includes some time each day either working on some basic coding challenges online (e.g. Advent of Code, some puzzles I found on Github, etc.) or learning something new about coding. So, this week I decided to try an experiment. I wanted to see how quickly it would take for me to adopt the basics of a new programming language. I mistakenly chose Go for this experiment. As a benchmark/metric, I decided to use the length of time it would take for me to learn enough to translate my Python solution to Go for the first Advent of Code challenge. The answer is: too long, especially when the documentation is a bit difficult to navigate.

I understand that what you are about to see is the programming equivalent of me going to Montreal and saying “poutine s’il vous plaît”, but I was unreasonably ecstatic when the following Go code printed the same answer as my Python code:

package main

import (
    "fmt"
)

func main() {
    //I know, it should iterate through an input file
    //and not just some huge string I copied in...
    //like I said, poutine please.
    input := "((((()..."
    floor := 0
    for _, char := range input {
        if string(char) == "(" {
            floor++
        } else if string(char) == ")" {
            floor--
        }
    }
    fmt.Printf("Santa is on %d floor\n", floor)
}

All I have to say is — yes that’s an hour I’ll never have back, but I learned it all by myself, yeaaaaaah! Plus, Go is a fascinating language, and I would love to return to learning more of it when I am a more experienced software engineer.

Lastly, I just wanted to say that in addition to learning the HTML and CSS at Hackbright, I’m also continuously poking and prodding the code for this site. I’ve applied a few CSS adjustments over the course of the week, although I have not applied Bootstrap. There are a couple of reasons for this:

  • This site is pretty minimal and applying Bootstrap just feels a little bit like bringing a bazooka to a knife fight
  • A designer I somewhat admire once told me, when I first started learning to code seriously, that this website should be a learning experience. In order for that to be fully effective, I should code and understand all the moving pieces myself (I feel like learning seems to be a pretty big theme for me lately…). So even though I’ve since come to the conclusion that I am not particularly exuberated by HTML and CSS, and will probably Bootstrap future stuff, working on this has helped solidify a foundation for me, which I really appreciate.

That wraps up this whirlwind of a week and as usual, thanks for reading, cheers!