Codam Coding College — Piscine Day 6 — Rush 00
Technically, this is my 6th day of the ¨Piscine¨ at Codam Coding College in Amsterdam. I wanted to start blogging from Day 1, but I ended up with a brutal headache on Piscine Day 1 and had to head home and recoup. After that, I was putting in 11-hour days at Codam, not including my commute! I´ve barely had a chance to catch my breath, but it´s been a great experience. I really want to share it, but my posts will be out of order since I´ll be starting from Day 6 and updating about Days 1–5 in later posts.
Okay, here it goes!
Today was our first group assignment. This is what Codam calls the ¨Rush¨. Each Rush starts on Friday evening around 8:30 p.m. You get access to the assignments and you´re notified who your group members are. Teams are chosen randomly to promote fairness by mixing up skill levels. I had two other members in my group. We were coincidentally all female, so that was interesting! There were 5 different assignments. Only 1 was mandatory, but after completing the 1st one, you can continue on and complete the other 4 for bonus points. The catch: if your main assignment is wrong, you´ll get no points at all, even for the extra assignments you did.
On Wednesday, we´ll be evaluated on our main assignments. I assume we´ll also be evaluated on the other 4, too. When it comes to the evaluation, every person in the group has to be able to explain what is going on in the code. If one team member can´t, the whole team gets a failing grade. Basically, your team is only as strong as its weakest member. My advice is the following: 1) don´t divide and conquer and 2) let the weak team member lead with coding. Work on the assignment together using one computer. You have from Friday evening to Sunday at 11:42 p.m. to complete the assignment, so plenty of time.
Without going into too much detail, we had to create a square of different characters. We´re only allowed to use a maximum of 25 lines of code (this goes for all assignments throughout the entire Piscine), so we struggled a bit with condensing the code in one of the files. In the end, we completed our main assignment and went on to do the other 4 assignments for bonus points.
I wasn´t a very big fan of the Rush compared to the other days because the Rush has a strict deadline for completing and understanding everything. It´s also incredibly difficult to have code explained to you by someone who´s not native in the language in which they´re explaining everything. To top it all off, we sat in a different cluster today which has the European keyboards. I´m not familiar with the keyboard layout at all, so it was really hard to type.
Now the agenda for tomorrow is to go over the code to make sure I fully understand it and to get evaluated on my Shell00 assignment (read previous posts for more about this).
