Code Academy: Week Four

I've finally taken off on my own. During the first three weeks of the course, I was "coding" during class time with the help of classmates and the instructor or with the hand holding of web tutorials. This safety net was necessary at first but after three weeks under my belt, I decided I'd give everything a try on my own during week four.

During class this week, we worked on our first full scale Rails app. Whereas during the first three weeks we worked on small examples to put concepts into practice, this week we were presented with a more complete picture of a business/site and spent the entire week building out the web application, an airline site that allows users to sign-up/sign-in/out, view flights available, and book reservations. As usual, we were paired up in class and built the application after watching the instructor implement each feature. Working with someone and coding immediately after watching the instructor makes everything a lot easier than it should be and can dangerously lead one to believe he knows what he's doing. This weekend I worked alone to try to build the site from scratch. To find out if I actually knew what I was doing.

The answer - somewhat. I didn't get all the way through and spent a lot of time stuck at various points while writing the code. It took me way too long to get things working but regardless, I feel pretty good with what I was able to accomplish. What I was able to build on my own isn't too far off from what we built in class, and I've found that I understand the concepts we've learned in class much more deeply after having to troubleshoot my errors by reading the Rails guides. The most exciting part is that the site I built has a lot of the functionality that any web application requires; additional features would be nice but as for a basic site that includes just about everything you need, I built it on my own this weekend! Pretty sweet considering I didn't know anything but the name Ruby on Rails four weeks ago and that it was my first time working on my own.

On to week five.