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Welcome to the twilightzone flipside! I'm writing this from the end of Week Four of the Makers Academy PreCourse. My last post only really covered the first day (it was that light-a work load) so here I'll be telling you what else I got up to! It's all rather exciting so I hope you're sitting down. And, as always kids, arms and legs inside the ride.

I'm assuming you read the first part of this week's post, if you haven't go and do it now, go on. I'll wait.  Done? Good. Okay so what else have I been up to this week? Well let me first start by telling you about a little conversation I had last week.

On the Friday I went to the Makers Academy graduation event - it's when all the Makers from the upper-most cohort present their final projects. It was also a good excuse to meet my mentor and her cohort - the people I'll be sharing the Academy with over the next 6 weeks. They're pretty great.. so far. Anyway, while talking about the PreCourse they planted an idea in my head.

I've said before that the work that was set for this week was easy - simple. They said that if i fancied a challenge I should try and deploy the FizzBuzz program to Heroku. WTF IS THAT? My understanding was that it was turning it into a fully functioning thing and hosting it on the Heroku website. I mean, thats basically what it is, but it wasn't that simple.

Also like I've said before: I love a challenge. So after about 6 hours I finally managed to do it. Which isn't bad going, to be honest. It required me to learn a brand new framework: Sinatra. This is a lightweight library that allows you to turn Ruby programs into a web application. It uses .erb templates and passes various block of whatever into them depending on what you write (obviously). In this case it passed HTML code that I wrote using ruby to handle the fizzing or the buzzing behind the scenes.

So I had to learn Sinatra, Embedded Ruby (.erb), HTML and eventually some CSS (webpage styling language) to make it look pretty. This was a pretty big undertaking and I can't tell you I fully understand it all, but eventually I got it to work! There was a lot of faffing around with things like Gemfiles and config files, but finding out what these are and how they fit into the structure of a thing was actually so rewarding. I suppose the journey is the most important part - having that grit to persevere through the unknown.

Anyway, this is exciting stuff. It means I have something to show you that isn't just code, I've made something and you can interact with it how you would anything else! 

Look! Are you kidding me?! That is so swish. You can go and see it for yourself here. I know it's still soemthing pretty simple, but I'm honestly so happy with myself for getting it done. Also; 

LOOK AT THIS BUTTON.

I added it as a GIF incase you're on a mobile device and can't appreciate it. It was all done in CSS which is something I didn't really get before - and even that animation is a bit confusing to me. But the fact that I got it all to work and look this good is such a win.

So that was that. I deployed my very first app. What next? Well after learning a new frame work I wanted to check that I really got it. So I made another one. This one is actually useful though. It's called 'Is it Friday today?'. I made it for all those times when you can't remember whether or not it's Friday - feel free to check whether or not today is Friday yourself! It changes when it's Friday. I thought that was pretty cool.

I'm now pretty much an all-powerful app developer. What is there left for me to do? Well, I brushed up a little on Codewars - I met up with some of the people on my cohort a few more times and it was good to talk about code and what we'd been doing this week. A few other people managed to deploy their apps to Heroku too - I think we're all pretty proud. It wasn't easy after all.

There were also a few of us that attended a talk at the Guardian's office in London, it was about getting a job in tech. It was interesting and good to meet other people in similar positions to me - though they were also very different. I made a few contacts and drank some beer. Not bad for a night's work. One thing I would say though if you're in a similar position as me - this sort of thing might be better left till later - as I'm nowhere near looking for a job at the moment, not all of it was particularly relevant. Still, good to show my face i suppose!

Another thing I've been doing this week is developing my understanding of the concept of code. What it is, what it means and how it should be. I've watched a lot of talks on't internet about the design of code - a lot about something called 'Object Oriented Design'. Gaining a rudimentary understanding of this concept helped me really understand what refactoring code is and different parts of a program should interact with each other. Two talks I thought were particularly good were by Sandi Metz - from what I can tell she's pretty big noise in Ruby. You can find her talk on OOD here and the other one I recommend (on something called Code Smells) here.

There's one last thing I did this week that I think is worth mentioning it. These last four weeks have been intense, I've learnt so much, met some great people and started on a journey to completely change my life (for the better.. probably). But from Monday it's going to get even more intense. I suppose its called a Coding Bootcamp for a reason.. With that in mind I made the decision to give myself a break and do something nice. I wouldn't want to start the main part of the course at Makers Academy already burnt out, so I went to on little spa break with my boyfriend.

It was good to grasp at the last bit of truly free time I'll be having for a while and do something nice with it. I think it was good for me to switch off if only for a little while - like I've said before, it's hard for me to switch off from coding - a change of scenery and a strangers hands all over my oily body was great.

The little break I had was on Thursday - this allowed me to make it to drinks with some of my cohort and the cohort above on Friday evening. I'm glad I was able to make it because they're all such great people, it was good to have some more alcohol time to get to know them a bit better! It was the last day of the upper-most cohort too so they were there too - graduates. Where I will be in 12 weeks time. Having all 3 levels in the same place was great - being able to see where I am now and where I'll be soon, surrounded by such happy and excited people. I've said it before and I'll say it again:

I'm really looking forward to changing my life with these guys.