Great news! I passed! It was definitely intense. I finished in about an hour and a half, but I felt like I could have finished faster if it wasn’t for the content. it was definitely hard. Funny story though, during the assessment, I was struggling for a bit because the naming conventions were screwing me over. It got to the point that I was failing specs because of the incorrect naming conventions, despite being consistent with their use across all my models and controllers. I didn’t have as much experience dropping tables or renaming columns so I was nervous to do any of those actions mid assessment. In a stroke of luck, I decided to just add a new column with the correct name, so while it’s not preferred to have a column in there that’s completely useless, for the purpose of the assessment, it would do. That was pretty much the only hiccup I had, other than needing to go back to my code every now and then to check for misspellings in the column names or what not.

Moving on from the assessment topic, well actually not really. I just want to briefly mention how sad it feels to have friends who were in the program, dismissed due to failed assessments. They weren’t poor programmers by any means, they just couldn’t test well. I really do feel like App Academy’s assessment system is fundamentally flawed, and that it could be improved. I just don’t know how. I’ve asked TA’s the rationale behind the policy, and it does make sense to a certain extent, but it doesn’t lessen the sting of getting dismissed yourself. But that is really something you’re made aware of going in, so you know what you signed up for by attending App Academy.

Okay, now moving on from the assessment topic, we’re starting JavaScript today! I’m crazy excited for JavaScript, except for the fact that due to the stress of Assessment 4, I’m kinda feeling out of it, and as a result already feeling behind. Assessment 4 was rough, but afterwards, we were assigned to build Rails lite. Basically our own smaller scaled framework that’s modeled after Rails. I wanted to be excited for the project, but it was extremely hard due to the complexity of the project, and the dulled mindset post assessment. One thing that fascinated me was learning that someone built their own website with their own completed Rails and ActiveRecord Lite. And that’s what I want to do. It’s really motivated me go back later to finish those projects. To be able to build this blogging website on my own custom framework would be absolutely dope.

Just wanted to close things off before the end of the post with something not coding bootcamp related. A couple classmates and I went out to San Pancho’s and had bomb ass tacos for Taco Tuesday. Highly recommend, 10/10 will be going again.

I’ll talk to you guys tomorrow with more on learning JavaScript!