RC week #3

A whole one two three weeks has passed since I began my programming journey at the Recurse Center!

Before the start of RC, I had the goal of doing a new project every two weeks OR two blog posts a week. I decided to do this after talking to RC alum Nat about his experience during RC.

I was also encouraged to go with this plan after talking to James, facilitator at RC. He’s advise really stuck with me. He said that the most important thing I can do as a beginner is to maximize the amount of code written each day!

I also came up with some rules to make the goal plausible and fun.

  • Each project/blog post has to be simple/silly/useful
  • Each project/blog post has to teach me something new about frontend development(HTML / CSS / JS)
  • Each project/blog post has to use the terminal, git and pushed to github.
  • Each project has to be named after an architect. (paying homage to a profession after abandoning it 🙂 )

Obviously this plan doesn’t work for everyone. But for me, I learn best if I study something by doing 12 different project on it as opposed to looking at that something 12 times.

The first week it was Mies. The second week was a blog post. And this week it is Rem and a post on data structures!

Ok. Here is what happened on the third week.

Day 15

  • I took a break from the React world and started playing with Processing/P5Js!
  • I pair programmed for the first time with Alberto. We talked SVGs as we both were working with them.
  • Alberto helped me fix a bug on the text tool for my Mies project. We also worked on implementing a keyboard shortcut for the drawing tools.
  • I’m hoping that I can make some of the changes by the end of the week.

Day 16

  • I started working on a project called Rem and it is a silly/fun video to emoji graphics converter thingy!
  • I came up with the idea after I remembered that I really liked Sam Jacob’s Emojipolis project and wanted to do something similar.
  • I continued to watch a udemy course on data structures and algorithms.

Day 17

  • I continued to work on Rem. I’m finding out that p5js is a lot of fun to work with!
  • I attended JS/Webstack topic of the week.
  • Paul presented his experience with promises and Carolina shared what she learned about different testing frameworks for React.
  • After Paul’s presentation on promises I started writing  a blog post about the basics of callbacks, promises and the new async await.

Day 18

  • I fixed up some bugs and added a keyboard shortcut feature to Mies, based on discussions I had with Alberto.

Day 19

  • Attended RC job profile filling out session, which was really helpful in getting me started thinking about jobs stuff.
  • Started a blog series on data structures and algorithms. Posted the first part on List ADTs.
  • I finished up Rem! It’s live here. Even though I had a lot of ambitious features planned I decided it is better to move on to another project and learn more new stuff.
  • I felt really productive this week.
  • Next week I’m thinking about working on a chrome extension.

Awesome Random Links found this week!

Week1 Week2