7.5h + 2.5h Today was a fun day at Launch Academy. In our morning mentor group I had to summarize two readings from last night. That was interesting to try to make them shorter without losing the detail. I only get a little bit nervous in situations like that, since I was sitting in a group talking to the group. It’ll be interesting to see how I feel when I do my lightning talk in two weeks because that will be a presentation with slides and me standing at a podium. Either way it’ll be a useful thing for me to do.

After the morning meeting we covered more TDD concepts. We are using rspec in ruby and it is very weird to do tdd for the first time. It feels like you are writing tiny bits of code and then pulling a slot machine to see if it’s any good. There was a long assignment last night that didn’t have much documentation, but did have a lot of tests. Our task was to run all of the tests, read the errors and then fix them. I finished everything, but at the end I didn’t feel like I had a very good job of how everything fit together because I had built it in such small pieces. The other way of looking at that is that I probably spent less time building features that are unneeded and architecting things that may be above my pay grade!

In the afternoon we covered the tdd process again. For the over-night homework we got an assignment on inheritance and one on building objects with tdd. Both were pretty straightforward, and I’m starting to like the rhythm of getting exposure to something at night in the readings, doing some work on that concept immediately, and then covering it again the next day more in-depth. It’s somewhat like we are making space on the shelf to put the info, and then slowly placing it up there.

I just remembered that I’m going to update my flashcard app with some new topics. off I go.