Thursday, October 15, 2015

The Week Before

What I've done so far...




So more than a week went by and preparing has gotten that much more strenuous. CDojo has emailed us to complete the pre-bootcamp work which is just a short 2-3 hour long session of watching Michael, the founder, talk about what to expect and how the school is ran and taught. What's funny was, Eric, my close friend was almost in all of the interviews. The messages across all students seems similar; work hard, don't worry about knowing everything, you're going to get frustrated multiple times throughout the course. It sounds daunting, and personally for me, not understanding all the aspects the first time will be a challenge to overcome since I'm so detail-oriented.

The second part of the pre-bootcamp work is the algorithm app. It's basically a series of small algorithm challenges and they said that all students before the camp should be able to do these with ease and in under 1-2 minutes. For the most part the algorithms just asked a lot of simple test questions like "What is the output of this program" and "Write a program that will do this" and it focused a lot on arrays. I went through it pretty quick and finished the 2 challenges they had before finishing the assessment at the end.

After all this, I began to work on the Web Fundamentals course. The HTML course was pretty short, and was a quick review of what I've been studying the past couple of months; tags, divisions, spans and simple HTML syntax (like !doctype html). The course also reviewed the history of the internet and how things came to be currently (HTML5). The two assignments were pretty easy and upon finishing, I went into the CSS course.

The CSS course was again, review but quickly the assignments became rather interesting. They stressed a lot about containers, with the first assignment being about creating random blocks of differing colors and moving/stacking upon each other using display: inline-block. I really didn't understand inline-block even after finishing the assignment; I just used past videos to copy what their code was like and make it my own. The second assignment got a bit more tricky and started to test html + css skills. The main objective was to figure out which tags to use, how to move texts and put them in the right order.

I thought of creating containers within containers so that any texts (within their own containers) can be moved separately without changing other stylings in the CSS file. The project took me a good 2-3 hours to finish and the main concept I learned from it was using the idea of containers within containers to move objects around.

Now the third assignment took me by surprise since it was replicating an entire webpage. I was pretty surprised how quickly the level of difficulty jumped but after a good 4-6 hours of working on it, I was very happy with the result. Not all the colors were perfect, it looked very similar and I was very proud of my work. The fourth assignment was replicating another webpage that had more images and learning from the third assignment, I didn't panic. I just slowly mapped out my containers and built the webpage piece by piece. This took around 6 hours and there were a lot of planning and re-writing code because there were multiple pieces that were the same, that can be written with one CSS properties. I think the hardest part about these two assignments, particularly the last one was that, when you finished almost everything and you're on the last part, one new line of CSS might screw up all the margining. So most of the time isn't spent writing the code or creating the webpage but tweaking for 3 hours the code you wrote in 15 minutes.

The next part of CSS is the yellow belt exam. I will not be taking it now, since CDojo emailed us about a new learning platform. I saw J-Query and the Command-Line as the next two topics covered in Web Fundamentals, so I will be taking a break from CSS and get a solid foundation in J-Query and the Command-Line on CodeAcademy!

Expect my next post pretty soon!


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