1) I need to practice not freezing like a deer in the headlights during live coding. I started out decently enough, verbalizing outloud that I needed to create a form in order to make a search bar. But then I got to a stumbling block, where I couldn’t remember the method I needed to use to find an object by its name (it was find_by_name….yeah). When I couldn’t remember the method in the first few seconds, panic set in, and then I just got really quiet all of a sudden. I’m not sure if it was 30 seconds or 15 minutes, but it felt like an eternity of silence. I definitely need more practice in this area before tackling a job interview!
2) My weakest areas from the Sinatra section are sessions/cookies and password encryption. Yup, two pretty important concepts. This leads me to my next takeaway…
3) The period between my CLI Assessment and my Sinatra Assessment was too long; I was starting to forget things I had learned in the earlier sections. I need to work on doing a little bit every day and avoid gaps in my learning. I struggle with doing my labs in fits and starts, and with every day that goes by without coding, it gets a little bit harder to jump back into it.
4) I’m fairly strong in being able to follow the flow of my app and to explain it to others from entry to exit point. I even enjoyed explaining it, which says a lot because I’m pretty introverted.
5) Github updates should be in the present tense. I have been doing them all in the past tense up to this point. I have been thinking about it the wrong way…as a solitary endeavor, where I am just reporting my actions to myself. But the whole point of Git is collaboration, and when contributing to projects, I can’t assume that my changes have already been incorporated. Instead, I should use present tense to explain what the commit would do to the project.
6) Job interviews are going to suck…but I can do this!