When I look back on the past two weeks, its hard to believe how far the class has come. And while it seems like each day has been more challenging than the last, its clear that we’re moving forward and covering a lot of ground. Avi mentioned that coding is hard because you’re always at the edge of your knowledge; it doesn’t get less difficult, you just move onto more advanced stuff. My classmate Victoria put it well in her blog when she mentions that each day brings new frustrations, but only because we’re pushing ourselves and not resting on what we already know.

This is an instance of a blog post. In object oriented programming languages, like Ruby, the existence of a class, in this case a “Blog Post,” is independent of an individual instance of such class (i.e., this blog post). Each blog post has similar attributes with different values, such as title, author and date. These are known as instance methods in Ruby. However, the “Blog Post” class may have class-level methods that are inaccesible by a single instance of a blog post.

I am currently reading Daniel Kahneman’s pop psych book “Thinking, Fast and Slow”. The basic premise of the book is that humans have two generalized thought processes - one that is reflexive and instinctual (System 1), and another that is more rational and deliberative (System 2). Book smarts are commonly equated to the latter and streets smarts to the former. I often think that coding has a similar thought pattern to it, which is unsurprising given that computers are designed to mimic human thought and communication, in a context-stripped yet efficient manner.

We covered a lot of material today, from the value of semantic mark-up in HTML to how to build web scrapers in Ruby. The day started with a review of our homework from the previous night, which was to recreate a song cataloging program that we had written using hash iteration. Using hashes rather than arrays to organize our song list enabled us to utilize metadata about the artist, album and song title that are accessible via hash keys.

Much of the morning today was spent going through the Ruby homework we had over the weekend. In addition to a number of short homework assignments, we had to work on online modules at RubyMonk and RubyKoans. We explored topics like hash iteration, symbols and data structures in Ruby. In addition, we built a simple jukebox program in Ruby that allows for user interaction to select a song from a playlist. It seems like simple stuff, but it was a great exercise to think about how to break down the larger problem into smaller pieces.

Sometime around the middle of last year I realized that I wasn’t satisfied with my job. I was working at a large alternative asset manager, helping structure hedge fund investment products and doing legal due diligence on hedge funds. It was my first job after graduating college, and I took the position to dip my toes in the corporate waters and explore careers in finance or law - two paths that college seniors from top schools seem to gravitate towards, despite knowing, at least for me, very little about what it means to actually work in finance or law.

You should learn how to code. Even if you don’t want to be a programmer, coding is the new literacy. Don’t worry if you don’t have a technical background and never touched code in your life. I came to Flatiron having only taken one programming course ever. I worried that I was too old to learn this stuff; it seemed like everyone was either a computer science major or had been coding since they were kids. However, I’ve learned that the technology has become much more accessible to beginners in the past few years.

Flatiron is now 1/12 the way done. The first week has been pretty great; after lecture on Friday I felt physically exhausted, but mentally I was running a mile a minute, thinking of all the stuff that’s out there to learn. My schedule has generally been to get into school around 9 am, morning lecture, lunch, afternoon lecture, group work, then wrap up around 6 pm, after which I’ll stay until 7:30/8:00. I realize that it’s only been one week, but I’ve already learned a ton.

In grade school, snow days meant building snowmen, tossing snow balls and going sledding. At the Flatiron School, snow days mean 6 hours of lecture via video conference. Avi and Co “cancelled” class today in advance of Snowmageddon 2013, but only in the sense that we weren’t expected to physically be in class. Instead, Avi set up a videoconference and hosted virtual class where we continued exploring Ruby.

This morning, we started with a review of the SQL homework and ventured into the wide world of SQL joins, followed by the start of our Ruby learning in the afternoon. Regarding SQL, I struggled a bit with the homework last night, but after I read up a bit more on joins, the confusion lessened and I was able to create a working quiz database. Our task was to (i) design a database schema, (ii) populate the database, (iii) query the database and (iv) determine quiz scores. I’ve published the SQL code I wrote to accomplish this task after the jump.