My Road to Code

Spring is hopefully round the corner, but this week we are looking at a different kind of Spring - the Java Framework.  It's pretty cool and can do all sorts of 'black magic!'  As usual there are lots of new terminologies to learn - ORM's (Object Relational Mappers), POJO (love this one - Plain Old Java Object)  and dependency injection to name but a few. I mentioned black magic before, well it certainly feels at times that Spring is doing something like this!  It is such a powerful framework, for example the 7 restful routes are written in for you so you don't have to write them at all!  And instead of writing SQL queries for custom routes you write a sort of plain English derived query - both of which save a lot of time. REFLECTIONS I am finding myself reflecting on my journey more and more, probably because we really only have one more week of lessons left!  (then it's final project week after that!). It's hard to compare the "me" that started t...

Homeschooling & Learning to Code Remember back at the start of this journey that I said I would be happy if everyone was still alive and wearing clean pants by the end of the 16 weeks?!  Now homeschooling has been thrown into the mix too!  Thankfully my kids are 10 and 12 AND this is second time around so they pretty much know what they're doing.  It has meant a wee tweak to the 'schedule' here and there, I'm doing batch cooking for the week as much as I can on a Sunday so the time I would usually spend cooking first thing in the morning can be spent checking that they both know what they're working on that day.  And the time making the dinner in the evening can be spent checking that work!  Codeclan have also be great in adapting to the new routines that many of us have.  All classes are now being recorded so we can look back over any bit that we may have missed if we had to dive out and sort out technology failures/urgent questions/look at my picture ...

Week 11 I am so happy to be back to the routine of learning after the Christmas break.  This module is all about Java and I have had to wave goodbye to my beloved VS Code text editor in exchange for IntelliJ IDEA (which is an integrated Development Environment rather than a text editor - it has waaay more tools at its disposal).  I had that initial gulp of imposter syndrome - a new environment that I don't know my way around...Thankfully that feeling didn't last long - there are lots of new features that I will need to work my way through and become familiar with, but the bare bones are pretty much the same as VS Code.  I now need to go and find how to install my beloved bracket colouriser.... Typing colouriser there made me think back to starting coding and how unnatural it felt to be typing color rather than colour (for my non coding pals - CSS (lets us style webpages) is written in US English)- a few months down the line and it is creeping into my everyday writing and ...

New Year New Notepad! Yep, that's me all set and ready to resume week 11 of the 16 week Professional Development Course at Codeclan.  Thankfully our cohort is already fully remote so we won't have some of the upheaval that others will have following todays announcement.  Bert the Codeclan duck is at the ready to listen to me debug and notepad number 3 is ready and waiting to start the last module - Java.  But before I tell you about week 11, here's what we did in week 10!  Working 9 'til 5 That's the hoped for outcome of this weeks inputs!  No coding this week (well not during class time anyway)  This week it is all about creating the brand of 'Us'.  This has been a hugely intensive course so far and this week is already proving to be more of the same.  No rest when you're updating your Linkedin profile, writing your personal profile for your CV and prepping for mock tech interviews.  My To Do list is growing at a rate of a mile a minute! Wha...