11h today was a long one full of capybara acceptance tests and readings and networking. This is my first time doing acceptance testing and it’s pretty cool to be able to script the ui like we are doing. It reminds me of so much time I spent in applescript trying to get website forms to fill out automatically, or trying to debug something with recorded mouse movements. It’s pretty neat, and I can see how it is super useful for web development.
I also stayed a bit late for mentor night. Mentor night is when grads hang out for a little bit to answer questions and talk about their journey. The few I have spoken to have good perspective and it’s great to hear their advice.
We also did a lot of talking about promises today. I’m not sure why it is so difficult, but the concept definitely doesn’t make sense to some people at first. It does seem a little hand-wavey compared to a lot of the other concepts we have been exposed to. I’m hoping that it’ll make more sense to them all tomorrow morning. We DO have a test on all of this friday AM after all!
Lastly I’ve been going back and forth on snippits. They seem like a super useful thing to use, but they definitely also slow or prevent your mind from building that muscle memory you need to recall it down the road. I have a snippit for a react component in atom and I have probably used it 15 times. I don’t think I could nail the exact syntax off the top of my head though. That makes me feel like I should work on memorizing it first, and then simplify my typing second. I bet life will start to get crazy as the weeks go on, and I might end up falling back on a few.
Today I only typed 12k characters. I also set up my iphone as a second screen. It’s pretty hilarious.