Day 1

Today was the first day of my 12 weeks at Makers Academy. There are five other guys in my cohort and we started the day by gathering briefly with the other cohorts and the teachers, and introducing ourselves. There are enough people at Makers at any one time that there’s a good buzz going, but not so many that it feels impersonal.

My cohort then got led to the boardroom at Makers and Rob, a co-founder, gave us a short talk about the ethos and culture at Makers Academy. Essentially, he said that we shouldn’t try to understand 100% of something before moving on to learn the next thing, and (like Facebook) we should move fast and break things. I’m definitely a perfectionist and so those points really hit home and I’ll be trying to apply that as things get more difficult during the course. Rob also passed on his observation of students who do well and not so well on the course. Specifically, that the ones who do well are the ones who ask questions and do lots of reading around the subject and try and put it into practice.

Rob then handed out Macbook Pros(!) which are loaned out to students for the duration of the course. Even though students have the option to work on their own computers, I jumped at the chance to use something better and faster than my 5 year old macbook!

A nice touch was the swag (where does that word come from anyway?) Rob then gave to each student: a Makers Academy fleece and a Moleskine notebook. They’re definitely not cutting corners here. I’m definitely appreciating all the extra things which Makers doesn’t really have to do, e.g. the beer and pizza party the Friday before the course started and the well stocked drinks fridge and snacks in the kitchen.

We then got introduced to our teacher for the next couple of weeks and got down to the nitty gritty of configuring our macbooks and getting RVM and Ruby 2.0 set up, as well as applications like Sublime Text.

With all the different problems encountered, and the fact that the internet ground to a halt with so many students trying to install things, the morning went by pretty quickly.  We then spent the afternoon going over some of the fundamentals of Git, a version control and code management system.

Gem of the day: origin refers to the remote (an alias) and master to the branch (obviously those can change).

Oh, and during lunch we had Ali from Happy Bear Software come by and give us a quick overview of web application security. It’s great to hear what people in the industry/trenches have to say  and I’m definitely looking forward to the next talk.