On Day 3 of The Flatiron School, we continued setting up our Octopress blogs. Avi walked through the rake commands and how each one works, which was helpful in demystifying the commands and directory structure. He reassured us that all of the commands that we execute to create new posts, deploy the site, etc., could themselves be found in files in our application. We examined the Gemfile and Rakefile, making small manipulations and running test code to make sure that they worked.

Day 2 of The Flatiron School was a success. Today’s main focus was to set up our Octopress blogs (the result of which is on your screen) and set up our development environments. Its remarkable to think about all of the stuff that goes on "under the hood" when developing software - before today I didn’t really know what dot files were, and now I realize how fundamental they are to a smooth development experience (case in point, I screwed up my .bash_profile yesterday and that nearly forced me to reformat my machine).

Day 1 of Winter/Spring 2013 of The Flatiron School is in the books! Today, Avi applied the philosophy of “deploy on day 1” and required us all to create student profile pages and merge the various branches of the base files using git. Most of the morning was spent establishing a basic working environment (Avi promised that we’d go through environment configuration in Day 2), forking the Github Flatiron student profile page and modifying the HTML, CSS and JavaScript files to match our content.