Day 11

First Day On-Site!

Woke up today pretty early at 6:30AM. Got a good amount of sleep last night and packed up all my food. Unfortunately by the time I got there, all the parking spots got taken up. The email wasn't kidding about no parking spaces. I parked with a friend at the nearby Toys 'R Us: there doesn't seem to be any rules about parking there for any length of hour so here's to hoping there's no ticket on my hood when I leave today.

This is what the setup is like for our cohort:

A good chunk of today was devoted to setting up Python on our laptops. Installed everything via terminal which was pretty cool. Kris went through the basic syntax of Python really quickly. I'm probably going back to the Dojo website to catch up on anything I didn't know. Python is really simple to learn yet tricky in a lot of ways since it does things differently than what I'm used to in Java/JavaScript.

In Java/JS you write for loops as 

• for (var i = 0; i < #; i+#) {} 

But in Python, the syntax is 

• for i in range (#, #):
• And the fact that everything is differentiated by indentation.

The biggest difference for me in doing problems with arrays (or lists, as it's called in Python) is that in JS, all the for loops I've written to go through every array element is via 

• for (var i = 0; i < array.length; i++) {some function with array[i]}

You can do for loops via the basic for i in range etc. but a TA showed me, in my opinion, a better way: for i in list_name:

Thats it! Another cool bit of code is that when you are in a for loop to look at each elements of a list, you can write i[#] to look at the specific characters in an element (that's a string) and pull that number out for use, which is what I had to do in an assignment. Also, a new conditional statement for Python: if type(i) is int: which is basically saying if the element of the array at i is an int, then...

I didn't expect this many students and with such diverse age and background. There was a lot of learning going on today especially with nested dictionaries which I still haven't fully comprehend but will try to do more on it at a later tie. A dictionary is essentially a library for all lists and touples (immutable lists) and can have another sub-dictionaries in them. The biggest pain of nested dictionaries is how to access the values as there are a lot of different ways to do it. Some easy, some way too complicated for our assignment. One way we learned was to use enumerate and the second is to create a 3rd nested for loop.

8 hours went by really quick today and I can definitely see how the pace can be very quick very fast.