4.75h Today I took a step back and reevaluated my study focus. I came to the conclusion that I’m not going to need redux in the bootcamp and that I should focus on things I will learn there to make the process a bit easier. They cover redux in the post-grad section, so it is important but not enough to try to squeeze it into the 18 weeks of instruction.

I also talked with a recent grad quickly and he had some interesting thoughts.

• They didn’t use node as a backend, only ruby
• They are tested once a week during the first 6 weeks of on-campus instruction. The tests are pass/fail. If you fail 2 you do not graduate.
• Roughly a third of the class did not graduate

So that makes me a little frightened. I hadn’t thought about the possibility of going through all of this and not passing! I also have been back-burnering ruby because I thought I read that node was used in the back end. I need to put some more ruby time on my calendar. I also realized that I need to pre-run as many of the topics as possible in order to get a loose understanding of them (if not more.) I’d love to know everything and then just get much better at it in class, but I’m trying to be realistic by aiming for awareness vs mastery! One thing I took away from the learning how to learn class was that having a good outline of a concept before you start learning it can really help connect the pieces together. Their analogy was how people start with the outside pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, and I think that is a great analogy for this. I’m implementing it when I try to get an overview of the syllabus ideas. Even if mastery takes months, the wide view will hopefully stick tight and help out once they start teaching it.

I started implementing my new plan by ripping through the remaining Modern React and Redux videos (no more redux after that) and looking into the testing frameworks on the Launch Academy syllabus: Enzyme, Karma, and Jasmine. It is super difficult to understand why LA uses those three, or what it uses them for specifically, but I got a better understanding of the terminology and I looked at some test code for most of the testing packages.

I have a lot to learn before I start learning a lot.

I’m planning on building some time back into the schedule to brush up on ruby again. I may look through the syllabus again to pick out the ruby-specific packages they teach. I remember  seeing rails, RSpec, capybara, sinatra and a few more of them. I also signed up for a short (5.5h) postgreSQL udemy class. One of these days I need to spend some time actually mapping out what to learn on  a calendar since they drop the preflight work starting on dec 24! That’s a month and a half away, and ignition starts in two months ( 61d ) exactly!

Here are some things I read and liked today

Enzyme Tutorial – How to Write Test Code for React

I think this is a good overview of enzyme. There are still a lot of testing concepts I need to understand before this makes a ton of sense, but the broad strokes look reasonable. This also looks like it may be a boot camp student presentation. It was well done, but he kept referring to his ‘senior project’.

An Overview of JavaScript Testing in 2018

This was a great overview of the testing landscape. I’m not looking at it in order to actually learn how to test, but it gives a good overview of the options and terminology. It’s useful for providing a mental framework to hang the next lessons on.

How to go from idea to URL quickly with React.js and Heroku

This was an ok introduction, but it’s really only saying “I figured out how to do this so you don’t have to” Or at least it feels that way. The author has made it seem difficult to set up the first time and easy to set up every other time. I’m hopeful to understand the first-time set up better in the near future.

How to develop your React superpowers with the Container Pattern

This was interesting, and really the first time that a design pattern seemed like it was relevant to me. I’m sure that many of them are, but I didn’t see the light before reading this. I’m still face down in the trenches trying to figure out how to wire stuff up so lofty thoughts like design patterns feel far away, but it’s still good to learn for once I do have mastery of the low level skills.