Friday was a pretty fun day despite it being the end of the week. While the week started off pretty bad, it’s been looking up as the week wore on. The sting of the failed assessment started to lessen around mid-week, but I guarantee you my drive to finish the program is stronger than ever. I’ve been doing the practice assessment every other hour since Friday night, and I’m sitting at 8 completions so far, and the day is still young. The last three attempts haven’t exceeded 40 minutes, which is great, especially for an assessment with 2 hours allotted, but it kinda leads me to my next worry. Being this comfortable with the practice assessment was what led me into that false sense of security for the last assessment, but it’s my hope that going through the previous projects and trying to get as much exposure to the many ways a/A can throw curve balls will help me prepare for the actual assessment on Tuesday. That said, since the assessment is on Tuesday rather than Monday, expect a slightly later post on Tuesday.

Alright, enough assessment talk. Let’s talk about Friday’s project! In class that day, we worked on a clone for reddit. It was really interesting to learn how we could take what we learned so far, and set up a scaled down version of Reddit, with the basic functionalities, starting with user authentication. It feels really good to know that I have a pretty good grasp of the concepts of not only authentication, but the MVC model as a whole. So far, I’m able to tackle bugs pretty well by mapping the route a request would take from start to finish in my head or on paper, and pinpoint where the bug is mostly likely residing, or what the most probable ways a certain kind of bug can exist. As you can probably guess, the feeling is amazing, and really serves to cement my belief that I have what it takes to become a great developer and engineer.

I’m really excited for what’s to come this week. Besides the assessment on Tuesday, we’re starting our JavaScript curriculum Wednesday. Before the program, I studied a bit of JavaScript while preparing to apply to Hack Reactor and really enjoyed the language, albeit it isn’t as elegant as Ruby, it was still great to know that I can learn other languages fairly easily after learning Ruby. The one thing I know I had difficulty with was closures… who hasn’t right? But I’m looking forward to finding out how much my mind has developed as an engineer, and see if closures will come easily to me now that I’m capable of understanding the more complex concepts in Ruby.

I think that’s it for this week. I’ll be getting back to studying as well as doing the homework for Monday. Wish me luck Tuesday! I’ll talk to you guys then.