We're getting more and more files to worry about.

Apparently, last week was just a taster, nothing I don’t already know. But this week has been by far the most intense week I have experienced in the course. The fatigue was so real, I was always exhausted by the end of the day. But I blame it on my issues with taking breaks as I like to keep my momentum.

I always felt a little embarrassed whenever a partner (during pair programming) reminds me we haven’t taken a break in an hour. If you’re reading this and we have pair programmed before, I apologise for my lack of presence of time! I am working on it and I might try and start using the Pomodoro technique from now on to try and remind myself to take breaks away from the screen.

Additionally, I had faced small setup issues here and there for reasons unbeknownst to me, and I’m lucky nchelp is always a couple of clicks away. But I try to think of nchelp as a last resort and solve issues on my own because when I am released in the real tech world, I would not have nchelp to help me fix things!

What we Learned This Week

We were still doing the things we learned last week and constantly refreshed and expanded on them, but there is always something new to learn!

There’s only a couple of things that were added this week, but they definitely changed the way we code.

• Connections
• Error handling
• Routers
• More TDD with Supertest
• Seeding with pg

Files, files, files!

Last week, we learned to separate our controller and module files from our app.js file. If I’m being honest, that tripped me for a bit, because I thought “That’s a lot of moving parts.” Little did I know we’ll be getting more.

So now, on top of our app/index, controllers, and models, we have files for error handling, database connections, seed.js + run-seed.js, etc. It probably looks very simple to the eye of an experienced developer, but this architecture used Confuse Ray on my n00b brain and I keep hurting myself in my confusion.

I appreciate our mentor Cameron (the absolute legend) for having the patience to sit with me for like an hour and a half just trying to help me grasp things and walking me through how the moving parts work. I swear, our mentors on Northcoders must have gone through a rigorous patience training to have the ability to put up with us n00biez.

My Understanding of Programming

I have said this even before I started the bootcamp, and I still say this today.

I compare learning programming with learning to paint. In the beginning, during the days when I considered a for loop to be super complicated, I had one colour in my arsenal. Sure, I could paint a monochromatic scene, but that’s not what I want. I want to paint with all the colours in the spectrum available. I want my sky to be hues of blue and pink and yellow, and I want my trees to be hues of green.

Northcoders is slowly providing me colours. This week, I can say I probably have all the primary colours (probably!), and if I explore and learn how to play with them, mix them around, I technically have all the colours I will ever need.

The colours are the skills. Not necessarily coding skills, but problem solving skills, debugging skills, communication skills, comprehension skills, and all the skills (heck, even Googling skills) that aide in programming.

Conclusion

This last week was definitely one of the weeks that rocked my 2021. I learned so much, and I’m happy to know that I will be learning more.

For our last week in the back-end block, on week 7, we will be having a five-day sprint. I say… BRING IT ON.

Read more of Karla's blog pieces: https://medium.com/@karlacodes