Its been a long day. I’ve been getting up at 4-5 AM for the past month, or maybe 5 weeks now, mainly to read stuff to prep for Lambda School and to write blog posts about it. Today, I got up around 5, looked at blog, video and podcast content from other Lambda students and shared their sites on my blog. Then, my first day in the full stack track started.

I’m in NY, so for me, the hours are basically 11 AM – 8 PM. I began by joining the Slack and letting someone in the general WEB23 channel know that I hadn’t been assigned a TL (team lead) yet. Within about 10 mins, I was assigned to Reed Turgeon and he invited me to a separate channel just for my group. This was probably around 10:30 AM.

By 11:00, Reed messaged everyone in the group’s Slack channel with a Zoom link and initiated our first online meetup. It ran for half an hour and I met my team. We’re a group of nine. There are no women in my group, and everyone is younger than I am. Our backgrounds and experience coding varied significantly. Two people came from literature backgrounds and had zero coding experience except for the pre-course. Two others had more experience and had even gone to other bootcamps. The rest were mainly like me – they had some familiarity with coding, but no real background in it.

Reed had us introduce ourselves, pick an animal to represent us if we were to reincarnate as one and share it with the group, and discuss our familiarity with coding. There were some interesting animal choices. Historically, I’ve identified with wolves, but I told the group that at this point, whatever was the roundest, slowest dog they could think of would basically be my spirit animal. One of the others picked a chicken. I can’t remember why right now, and another chose birds in general for the ability to fly.

We talked about general expectations and about how to get help if we needed it – including discussion about Lambda’s FLEX program, which is essentially when a student scores a 1 (the lowest score our of 3 on Challenges) twice in a row and can’t catch back up. The student can opt to move to a cohort that’s one unit behind and retake the unit that’s been proving difficult. It something that came up later in the day as well, and seems to really hit people when they move from JavaScript, later in the course, to React and Redux and other frameworks.

After the Zoom session with our team lead and the group, we were immediately invited to another Zoom session with our instructor for the first few weeks (maybe the first month), Brit Hemming. Brit was not previously a Lambda student, but went to another bootcamp in Canada. She then worked professionally as a developer for about 5 years, and is now an instructor at Lambda. She helped found a group – I can’t remember the name right now – that teaches coding around the world. She also loves to travel, so she’s been to about 35 other countries and has taught coding in many of them. Its an impressive feat.

Brit walked us through what our time at Lambda would look like for the next 9 months and answered questions from the greater WEB23 cohort, which was well over 100 people. We then took a short break (she tends to favor timed 5-minute breaks) and she walked us through transforming a big block of text on CodePen into a more properly-formatted web page using semantic HTML. We were invited to code along with her, but for some reason, when Slack and Zoom are opened at the same time on my computer, the performance hit is too big for me to do anything other than watch, which is what I did. The entire session was recorded and later released so we can watch it again, if needed.

Apparently, EVERY session of every class is recorded and archived, and we’re encouraged to watch them, to see how other instructors covered the same material. There were already more than a dozen archived video sessions just for day 1.

We took another break, and then Brit returned to the same CodePen page and walked us through formatting the page with CSS. I learned that there were some videos pertaining to today’s lessons that I should have watched before class started. This is true of every class, so I’m either going to have to watch them after class each day, or early in the AM when I get up. They’re located in the training kit for the class, and I think can also be found in the Google calendar for the class.

I’m not going to remember everything, but I know we looked at various html keywords, parent/child selectors, css specificity, inheritance, pseudo selectors, some fun css keywords like hover, using web fonts (like google fonts), semantic html and other things.

Its all a bit of a jumble in my head right now, but we ended up breaking at 2:00 EST and were given assignments. There were projects that we had to complete (2 of them, today) and optional Challenges. The 2nd project included several stretch goals. I also watched the videos that I should have watched prior to class and completed the code-along Challenges that were part of the lesson for those videos. This proved fortunate, because the concepts that we learned in the code-along Challenges were duplicated in the two projects that we had to complete, so I was able to reference my earlier efforts to complete the projects.

The first one called for us to take a block of text and format it using semantic html in accordance with a set of instructions. It didn’t take very long to complete and was purely text. There was very little formatting, if any at all.

The second one has us use CSS to format a variation of the html page we had previously worked on. It included images. These were the stretch goals:

***DO NOT ATTEMPT STRETCH UNTIL YOU ARE FINISHED WITH 
EVERYTHING ELSE!***

Stretch Task: Fork your final work and see how much you
can change the design without changing the HTML. Try to
transform the site by only using CSS selectors.

Stretch Task: Look at CSS animations and see if you could
integrate them on the navigation hovers.

Stretch Task: Pick a navigation item and create a new page
with the same header and footer as the home page. Example:
you could make a new page just for cookies. Be creative and
have fun coming up with your own unique content and styles.

*/

/*======= Create a new universal selector that changes the
font color to: #3C373B */

I completed the two projects and submitted them, but didn’t work on the stretch goals. We did learn that stretch goals later on become MVP (minimal viable product) criteria in future projects, so its a good idea to try them ahead of time, when they’re presented as stretch goals.

The Challenges varied greatly in difficulty. The first one was just like one of the video challenges and the first project I completed: format a text block into a web page using semantic html. This mainly made use of tags like <h1>, <p>, <header>, <nav>, <section> and <footer>, along with <a href=>.

The second one was more of a doozy. It dealt with inheritance and specificity using html and css. There were nested classes, some were like five levels deep. We had to change the color of text in each level to a specific color using css. I wasn’t able to complete it in the time that we had, but some others did using inline styling. After the day ended and I ate something and had the kids sit on me for a while, I returned and was able to complete it all using classes. Some of the nested classes were called using something akin to dot notation, and others were called using spaces in between nested generations. I’m actually still a bit unclear about the hierarchy, so I’ll need to revisit it again later.

There’s a bunch of stuff that I’m likely forgetting which I’ll also probably not remember to write about later. I’m not sure how frequently I’ll be able to blog about the course, as it gets busier, but I’ll try to at least outline or summarize future sessions. We covered a lot of material, considering I haven’t looked at html or css since writing blog posts about them in the early part of the pre-course a month ago. I’m generally happy with my first day, however.

Oh, at the end of the day, we submitted a form with our thoughts about the day and how we fared, then we had “standup” which is basically a meeting with our group and TL during which we just talk over the day’s events. The TL provided us with links to a bunch of programs that he said he wished his own TL had given to him early on in the course. They were programs for note-taking, timing ourselves, scheduling breaks from the computer, and maybe 1-2 other things. I already use Evernote, which was one of the programs he suggested for taking notes, but the rest were unfamiliar to me. I’ll share links to them later.