Week 17 at gSchool: Job Placement and Testing

Cameron Buckingham is a student at gSchool, a 6-month coding school in Colorado. He blogs each week about his experience at gSchool- this week, Cameron talks about prepping for job placement and interviews, and focus on testing!

Remember, the Course Report community is eligible for a $500 scholarship to gSchool!

And we're off! gSchool is officially hitting the ground running with job placement and interview preparation. It is a really exciting time. This week alone, we have had three companies, who are actively looking for Ruby on Rails programmers, come in and pitch their companies too us. We have also been concentrating on logic tests and interview prep skills for the imminent technical tests. In some ways we are circling back to the basics which helps to solidify our ruby skills. 
Our daily workflow has also morphed to more of a free-flowing structure. Our days still start at 9 am with a stand-up meeting and then a warm-up or assessment exercise and then a follow up lecture, but after that the day is mostly ours. Our instructors still offer breakouts and smaller lectures to go over tough exercises but we are given the opportunity to opt out of those if we have too much on our plate. 

One thing I have really put a lot of focus on is testing in my applications. It is really fulfilling to create an application but it feels a lot better when your app is supported by a full passing test suite. I know that at the beginning of the program I was quite upset that I spent so much time writing tests that sometimes didn't pass and slowed up the process, but now writing tests seems like second nature. Currently I write tests after I create a feature and make sure it passes. My goal is to incorporate the agile development of writing a test before I write the feature, so hopefully by the end of the program I will be able to do this!

I also wanted to put my email out there for anyone reading this blog to reach out and ask questions about the program. I have loved it so far and have seen so many rewards from it. My email iscameron.p.buckingham@gmail.com. You can also find me on twitter and github at cpbuckingham. Feel free to reach out to me about questions about gSchool or if you're looking for a ruby on rails developer!

Want to learn more about gSchool? Check out their School Page on Course Report or their website here!