Week 4 at gSchool: Challenges and Exercises

Cameron Buckingham is a student at gSchool, a 6-month coding school in Colorado. He blogs each week about his experience at gSchool- here, he talks about his struggles with arrays and hashes, and learning what a "wheelhouse" is and how it helps people learn!

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

As I roll into the Fourth of July weekend, I feel pretty happy with how much I have accomplished and learned so far. Since my last post, our instructors have been able to touch on many other platforms that were both illuminating and complex. Challenges and exercises are a main part of our learning curriculum and I love that. This program is set up to expand on everything you learn each day, so not only are we learning new things, but we also continue to build on our current knowledge. As of today we have successfully pushed several programs via Sinatra, learned more complex expressions in Ruby, basic CSS layout, HTML, test-driven development, and much more. 

I struggled early on with understanding iterating through arrays and hashes, but as time went on I realized several key actions that could be done to help me do that or even bypass it entirely. Also I had a couple of hiccups early on because I did not have an established "wheelhouse". A "wheelhouse" as I understand it is a set of established actions on how to deal with programming problems that you develop through experience and muscle memory. Sometimes that can be the hardest barrier for me when learning something new. That is why bootcamp programs such as these are critical for me because they allow more time to practice.

My favorite thing about entering week five is having the knowledge on how to create, manage, test, and push a program out to the world! That is a tremendous power that not many people have. I did not know going into this program that this knowledge would come so soon. I am very happy with that. 

-Cam

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