Week Eight ➙ Iron Yard Reflective Journal

Angulargeddon!

Week eight really ramped up the difficulty with different sorts of functionaity as well as more pratice with API-data and more ways to acquire and manipulate it, but also had some great breakthroughs… AngularJS definitely has a learning-curve, but I can already see some of the reasons it’s so powerful and useful. By the end of the week, after some repetitions with CodeSchool, and especially after Friday afternoon when some classmates really took the time to help me understand and impliment ngRepeat templates and get iterative functionality working, I was finally able to understand things much better, including some of the basics of partial views. In general, I felt that we learned a lot about dealing with API quirks and how to research solutions as well as working more effectively on a team this week. I’m also starting to better understand some of the uses of Lodash like _.pick and some of they ways those can be used with Angular. forEach() is also quite obviously useful and gaining some understanding of that was important.

There’re definitely times where my “impostor syndrome” is very real, but there’re other times where I see classmates struggling with things I know how to do and I do my best to help them out… And, at least, even if I sometimes couldn’t come up with a solution in the alotted time on my own, I’m at least at the point where I can usually understand what I’m seeing when I look at and read through a solution that one of my classmates came up with or that was demonstrated in class. Better yet, these days I’m finally feeling more able to apply and adapt some version of those solutions later in my own code more and more.

The presentation on Friday drove home how soon this crazy journey we’re on will be pushing into the final stretch. That is daunting but exciting, and I’m looking forward to the final project. I continue to take copious notes indefatiguably all day every day and absorb every morsel of computer-science theory or development best practices that gets dropped; no matter what I’m definitely getting my money’s worth here at the Iron Yard and I remain very happy with my decision to pursue such an accelerated program despite the stress, but it is starting to hit-home how soon it’ll all be coming to an end and I can only hope I’ll be ready for it when the time comes. I know there’ll be a lot I’ll still have to learn on the job, and I feel like this program is giving me the tools and knowledge to do that, but the prospect of job-search and interviews in this field does seem a bit initmidating to me.