Week 5 — JavaScript week

I used a lot of JavaScript in my last job, but because I learnt most of it by copying and pasting things I found on Google, I picked up some pretty bad habits (so many global functions, yay). This week has been a revelation — I finally understand how to use prototypes and constructors to better structure my code. It's been quite the challenge to unlearn what I thought I knew, but I'm a lot happier thinking about JavaScript in a more object-orientated way.

This has also been the graduation week for the seniors. They've been working hard to build and present their fully-functional apps. They all used entirely new technologies and frameworks that aren't in the curriculum, so I'm amazed at how much new learning happened in so little time.

Rails Girls, June 2016
Who is that awkward smiley person on the far-right?

Instead of doing the weekend challenge, I spent my Saturday volunteer-coaching at Rails Girls, a 1.5 day workshop to get badass women coding and building their first web-app using Ruby on Rails (RoR). 200 coaches and coachees turned up!

This time last year, I attended Rails Girls as a student (I hadn't touched Ruby or RoR before), and have since paid it forward by coaching at each subsequent event. I still haven't had much experience with RoR, but my understanding of MVC patterns, Ruby and CSS was more than enough. I spent a bit too long celebrating with the seniors on Friday, so I was running on 3-4 hours of sleep. I still had a great time and really think I got my coachee excited about code.

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