Day 4 at MakerSquare.
Started with explanations of why and how things happen here, which is always awesome. I like to understand thought processes and how decisions are made, especially related to design [speaking in the broadest sense of the word].
We were reminded of the Three Pillars to be instilled in us: teamwork, independence, and a love of problem solving. All noble qualities. This reminds me - I need to see if there’s a Twitter account that automatically sends out quotes from Stoic philosphers. If not, well, I’ll add it to the to-do list.
[Blast. Lost 20 minutes looking for Twitter accounts.]
Anyway, front-end. Introduction to Bootstrap and Foundation: Mind. Blown. In my earlier self-education, I had come across frameworks and dismissed them as convoluted and less hardcore than hand-coding CSS.
I’ve been a fool.
After lunch, we had our first MakerStory, courtesy of Stu Smith of Sputnik Creative. It was great to hear about his start from an artist to a designer to a creative director, and helpful to hear about how developers and artists can better work together. It’s at this point that I’m very glad that I have that experience from the ETC under my belt.
Back-end: Ruby is the nil machine. We spent time learning about classes and staring at instances and instance variables. Deciphering cryptic error messages is a special kind of puzzle.
It’s one thing to see that there are multiple ways to accomplish the same task in Ruby, but it’s quite another to see how using the send method and passing in symbols as arguments is the same as using those symbols as methods themselves. Madness.
Wrapped up the day with my first weekly meeting with Matt. I’m looking forward to bringing him questions as the weeks go on, but now it’s time to follow the advice he gave me: sleep.
Conquerors: laptop randomly dropping wireless signal during the day, rush hour traffic
Conquered: A.M. pull-ups, sending a birthday card to my grandmother, non-sarcastic Twitter conversations