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Hack Reactor Week 1 in Review

Week number one at Hack Reactor is over, I had my first day off since moving to SF, and we’re back at it for week 2. The pace this first week was crazy, and I can’t believe how much material we covered in such a short amount of time. I found myself getting home most nights about 11pm this week, simply because there was so much material to digest and work out in my code.

I also finally got my bike shipped out to me, which has been so much better than taking public transportation everywhere. My ride to school in the morning is about 5 miles, and I have been able to find a route that has as few hills as possible because it’s a single speed bike. Getting some exercise in the morning really gets me brain working correctly for the day, and I’ve been much more alert since starting that routine.

new-loki-cycles-bike

After re-building our pre-course assignments, we dove head first into quite a few basic computer science lessons and how to implement them in JavaScript. We also had a guest talk from a former senior team lead  at Facebook, and I attended my first JavaScript meetup. Here is a run-down of the major topics we covered in just the first 6 days:

  • Git workflow and command line
  • JavaScript basics like functions, methods, callbacks, closures, objects and scope
  • Recursion and as an example we re-built the getElementByClassName native JS function
  • The debugger command and the process of finding errors with Chrome dev tools and the console
  • JavaScript prototype chains
  • jQuery basics – used to make a simple Twitter clone
  • JavaScript classes and shared methods with functional, functional shared, prototypal, and pseudoclassical instantiation
  • Test Driven Development with Jasmine and Mocha
  • Object Oriented Programming: isolation, modularity, loose coupling, makers, mixins, subclassing, etc.
  • JavaScript event systems
  • Data Structures: hash tables, linked lists, trees, binary trees, sets, and big O notation

Wow, that is a ton of material now that I have it all together in one place. We implemented all of these bullet points in different sprints and projects this first week. I just hope I can retain it all in the weeks to come.

We also got to see the personal project presentations of all the students in the senior class, which is 6 weeks ahead of us in the Hack Reactor course work. Some of the web apps that were presented were very impressive, and I can’t wait to start applying some of my new knowledge to a project of my own. There seemed to be a few students that tried to tackle a project that was too ambitious for the time they had to work on it, and as a result we had to sit through presentations of projects with limited or incomplete functionality. I talked with a few of the senior students and they stressed the importance of limiting the scope of your project to start, then adding more features as time permits. Seems like a good engineering code to live by, in general.

Some resources I came across this week:
Coderbyte – small JavaScript problems with timers and scoring to practice your skills. A lot of fun and a good boost when you some a problem quickly.
HTML5 Conference Slide Decks – One of the presenters at the meetup this week, Dan Lynch, has his deck here, but it looks like tons of interesting content. I want to check it out when I have more time.
Fancy.js – A mashup of underscore.js and functional.js. Love the poker-themed demo.

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