Horizons School of Technology Week 1

This week was the first week at Horizons School of Technology. Horizons is a 16 week coding bootcamp I am attending in San Fransisco this Fall. It will teach me the essentials to become a Full Stack Web Developer and focuses on the React Framework.

Here is an outline of what I'll learn:

The average days are quite intense and so far, have been from 9AM - 9PM. This week we only went Tuesday to Friday because of Labor day, but this program is usually Monday - Friday and thus a 60 hour week. While that may seem long, I thoroughly enjoy coding, so it not only goes by fast, but I often go to sleep, excited to wake up the next morning.

For the duration of the coding bootcamp, I'm living at Hotel Epik in a long-stay room on the edge of the Tenderloin. For those who know San Fransisco, the Tenderloin isn't exactly the nicest area. However, it is close to a lot of cheap food, the Hotel is very nice, and it's an easy, relaxing 20 minute walk from the Horizons classroom. Here is a picture (from the internet) of the Hotel's outside.

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What I Learned This Week

This week was dedicated to Vanilla JavaScript. We started from the beginning and ended with some more advanced JavaScript concepts (such as bind, asynchronous code, objects, prototypes, etc.). While I had done some JavaScipt before, and even took a basic Web Development class at Colby, I had a lot to learn. By the end of the week, I was comfortable doing basic recursion and in love with the built in JavaScript array functions such as:

1. Map
2. Filter
3. ForEach
4. Reduce

Thus, by Friday a few other Horizonites (nickname for Horizon's students) and I were competing to see who could use the least lines of code to solve the daily problems... of course long single lines of code is generally bad practice. However, concise code, if it is readable, is always a plus.

A basic day this week was as follows:

9:00AM - 11:30AM Interactive Lecture
11:30AM - 12:00PM Meet your programming partner for the day
12:00PM - 1:00PM Lunch
1:00PM - 6:00PM Partner programming
6:00PM - 6:30PM Dinner
6:30PM - Finish Partner Programming

Partner programming: a really cool way to work out programming problems with a partner. Two people work on one computer, one person is the driver and types and the other person is the navigator and dictates. This is a good way to learn to explain your thought process and understand other people's problem solving techniques.

Here is a video of two people programming:

Source: Great JavaScript tutorials and topics by a very entertaining software engineer, MPJ. Check out his channel here: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCO1cgjhGzsSYb1rsB4bFe4Q.

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Food I Ate

I ate some incredible food this week. Living in SF, there is no reason to ever eat bad food and no reason to ever go to the same restaurant twice. I've been eating grocery store food for breakfast and lunch, but for dinner, I splurge. Here are the places I went this week.

SO Korean

Yelp: https://www.yelp.com/biz/so-san-francisco-4

Street Taco

Yelp: https://www.yelp.com/biz/street-taco-san-francisco

Manora's Thai Cuisine

Yelp: https://www.yelp.com/biz/manoras-thai-cuisine-san-francisco?osq=thai

A La Turca

Yelp: https://www.yelp.com/biz/a-la-turca-restaurant-san-francisco?osq=la+turka

Italian Homemade Company

Yelp: https://www.yelp.com/biz/italian-homemade-company-san-francisco?osq=italian

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Things that Happened

Bitcoin Developer's Meetup: probably the coolest meetup I have been to so far! Here Jonas Schnelli discussed BIP150, a peer authentication protocol that will help eliminate man in the middle delay attacks and make transactions more secure. I'll be honest, I was a little lost and this may not be an accurate description of BIP150. However, the coolest part of the meetup was simply being in the presence of so much Bitcoin power. There had to be at least 5 Bitcoin developers in the audience, the guy who implemented SegWit, and the creator of BitTorrent. I really felt like I was a member of a tech movement.

Followed by a homeless person: yep, sometimes this does happen. My friend and I were walking home, when all of a sudden, a homeless person began to follow us. We were never quite sure what he was saying to us, but after we jaywalked through a red light, we managed to get away from him.

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Conclusion

It was an incredible first week! Living in the city, discussing algorithms at lunch, and passing Twitter HQ on the way home, made me feel like I was part of the Valley... and if I keep working hard and stay curious every day at Horizons, I one day might be.

I'll try to keep these posts going on a weekly basis. If you found this post interesting, consider tossing me a follow, an upvote and/or a resteem :)

Hope everyone has a great weekend! Cheers and Steem on!