Portland Code School Blog: Week 1

gistfile1.txt

First week of Portland Code School: lessons learned.
<ul id=”random-thoughts”>

There are only so many hours in the day, pick your battles and make sure
have something interesting to ask or bring up for the next day's class. 
Specifically, DO YOUR HOMEWORK, it will pay off in class when you can actually
put the teacher to use. A schedule and notes will help with all of the above.

Don’t just voice your questions, voice them so everyone can hear them. 
It’s really important to over-communicate in a classroom. 
It’s ok to state the obvious, and it usually helps start the next conversation.

When it comes to projects, you will always have more and bigger ideas than
hours to bring them into existence. Focus on completing something simple, 
then blow it out!

There is a big difference between knowing a language and being able to solve 
programming problems with it, in the same way that having a large vocabulary 
does not mean you can write a compelling story.

Experimenting with Ruby's syntax is awesome, because many of your experiments 
will work just like you thought they would. It is a language that is very readable 
and just makes sense.

Applying agile development to a learning environment would probably revolutionize 
the education system. I know, because I'm in a class that is doing it. 

For instance, why doesn't every class at least have  a retrospective on completed 
projects, how the last week went, and the next could be improved? 
Somebody in the “system” has got to be experimenting with this, right?

I played a game of “Go” that involved voicing each players strategy as they 
made a move, along with reflection on other possible strategies after a stone was 
placed. Instead of a competition the game became akin to a pair programming session. 
In fact, it was one of the most fun and collaborative pairing sessions I have had.

A few things that have furrowed my brow or made me smile this week.

CSS selectors are ridiculous.
[class^="insanity"] + mentalbreakdown{
  background-color: tears;
}

Inserting unicode characters into webpages is going to be the new <blink> tag.
#portland:before{
	content: "\2602"
}

Ruby has an array method for almost EVERYTHING you can think of.
my_array.is_full_of_beans?
my_array.fill_with_beans!

Lastly, a passionate person can make any topic amazingly interesting, 
and an interesting topic life changing. Note to self, “be more passionate”.
</ul>

/usr/local/bin/peace.