Hellooo week 5! We’re really in the thick of it now. In less than two weeks we will lose the ‘juniors’ label and be fast approaching our final projects. This is going way too quickly! I am having the time of my life and in a way I don’t want it to end. When I look back at what we’ve accomplished so far it does make me feel really proud of myself and everyone in my cohort.

The weekend was pretty Makers oriented. I started the weekend challenge on Friday and worked on it for several hours each day, interspersing the work with various little outings (two of which involved Makers people!). As with the rest of the course it’s about finding a balance and I think this weekend I finally did that. Reading over my last blog post has reminded me that I wasn’t that confident I’d understood all of the material by Friday. Having now built Chitter - a clone of Twitter - without any major problems and in one weekend I can now see that the knowledge really did stick.

Nicola hosted a dinner for the June ladies last night, which involved food, wine, chatter and er.. Chitter. Once dessert had been eaten the laptops were out and the lounge became bug fixing central. I implemented my last feature and tried to help identify some of the database and config issues people were having. I’m liking how collaborative our group has become, and a big part of that is down to our pairing experiences. It just seems so natural now to help each other out and discuss together what we’re doing to approach a problem.

Today was the first day of JavaScript week which went really, really well. Having taught myself a lot of JS last year obviously helps, and I’m really enjoying expanding that knowledge and understanding everything so much better. Everyone who has experience with the language seems to be very excited about JavaScript. Apparently once you’ve seen past all the crazy brackets and let go of having a handy Ruby method for just about everything you embrace the amount of power and importance it has. People at Makers can often be overheard raving about Ember or the awesomeness of callbacks and I can’t wait to get more stuck into it. Today I learnt about functions as objects, used Jasmine, built a JavaBuzz game, did yoga, built a thermostat, and played tennis after dinner. I would say the week is off to a very good start :)

Nat x

If this dinner party was a TV series it would be called 'Come Code with Me'