My First Week at General Assembly

The week went a lot faster than what I imagined. I got to know my classmates straight away and I coded around 60 hours. 

General Assembly is a 12-week intensive coding bootcamp. I joined because I wanted to immerse myself into a community of coders and learn how to look at things differently.

The first week started with JavaScript. This new approach seems more fitting as JavaScript is ‘trending’ right now. So far, I’ve built a calculator and tictactoe in JavaScript. It’s not much, but I did some cool things with the DOM including random image generation, a computer player for tictactoe and some awesome design and hover effects.  I don’t think I could have learned the DOM any better than how I learned it with GA.

The DOM itself is not a hard to understand, nor is basic JavaScript. However, GA gives us challenges every night. If we complete the project, we can always ask for more. My classmates are quite competitive, but also a great friendly group to hang out with. 

Some nights were hard and others were really easy. I’ve only had a handful of assignments, so I feel confident enough to say it should get harder or at least I hope. 

Invaluable Knowledge

Here are few amazing ways to understand specific web concepts:</span></p>

CSS & Floats: 

Floats and absolute can be on the same web page. Simply separate them in containers by doing the following (using Sas compiler - separate divs for regular css):  div#container { position:relative; innerdiv{ position:absolute;  }

JavaScript Concepts & Tricks:

• Think of scope as climbing up out of a cave. You can’t look down inside functions you're passing through the current function, but you can always look up and see the functions and their variables. 
• 'This' is powerful. Use it whenever possible, unless your variables are shorter. 'This', essentially, calls the current object being acted upon (e.g event listener's  object).
• define variables early on and not in for loops.

var i = 0; for(i;i < 5;i++) {}

Play TicTacToe against Arnold Schwarzenegger:

http://evanjmg.com/projects/tictactoe/index.html