Today was a little more intense. We basically covered the rest of the pre-course review material. My coding partner, Daniel, and I were able to work through the rest of the problems but I felt like I struggled a bit. He exhibited a lot of patience and understanding while helping me to work through things.

Ultimately, we got through everything and I think I understood it! But it does shake the confidence ever so slightly. That said, we were able to quickly work through rewriting a number of functions that proved difficult during our pre-course. Stuff like _.memoize, .reject, .filter, .every and a few others.

The morning lectures were a town hall format where we asked questions based on certain topics we studied on our own. This featured things like scopes and closures. Overall, I think I am pretty comfortable with the concept though people were asking some crazy questions that made me wonder if I was missing anything. Basically, stuff like memory management and such.

Our instructor said that this was unnecessary complexity that we shouldn’t worry about right now, which is really reassuring. One of his awesome quotes was that pre-optimization is the enemy of progress. Really, we shouldn’t concern ourselves with that at all right now. Marcus said that we should optimize our web apps when there’s an actual problem that needs optimization. I’ll need to keep that in mind.

In the afternoon, we finished up rewriting our underbar functions and then had a lecture on how to succeed at Hack Reactor.

There was a lot of great stuff in the lecture that focused on the personality, technical backgrounds (and lack thereof) that go into the ideal HR student / graduate. Things like:

Fixed vs Growth Mindset

- Some think their value is based on some intrinsic quality. Others think is can change over time.
- Growth mindset: Experience joy at failing at a thing and treat it as a learning process.
- What kinds of people need a growth mindset? Effective learners and effective programmers.

Coding isn't fast
- This is why people deride the idea of improving VIM and emacs skills – so little keystrokes. You should be thinking about the program / problem, not the application you use.

How can I tell how I'm doing?
- Don't gauge yourself with regard to others! Only with the curriculum.

This lecture took about 1 and a half hours and ended at 8pm. Marcus (who is a co-founder of Hack Reactor and a CTO) dismissed the class but held an optional fireside chat that around a dozen of us took part it. It was kind of awesome to have this personal one on one time with him.

Everyone asked him tons of questions on best companies to work for, taking equity vs salary, interview questions, how to find out if the culture is right, etc. It was interesting but I was personally more interested in what he had to say about how we could succeed RIGHT NOW and in the next 12 weeks.

So, I asked him what those of us from less technical backgrounds could do to cope with or reduce “imposter syndrome,” that tinge of self doubt the seems to crop up every now and then. At this point about a quarter of the remaining students left. Sorry, dudes!

Anyway, he had some great answers in how we should trust Hack Reactor and trust our peers who are helping us and supporting us. He said that if it’s really an issue, we should ultimately talk to HR staff and make sure everything is staying on track. I kind of felt like some of the other students think that I’m considering quitting. No way! I just want to make sure I’m doing everything I can to be in the right place, mentally and emotionally.

Another student followed up a bit later with a question on how students with lesser tech background could avoid being bogged down in complexity and only focus on what we need to worry about. He brought up the point about students asking about memory management techniques and how that sort of thing is unnecessary, especially when we’re just trying to grasp the basics.

Anyway, that was it. Only 2 questions out of 2 dozen that wanted to know how we should deal with things going on now. Overall though, it was really awesome to have more personal communication with him and have him get to know me as well.

Like last night, we wrapped things up just after 9 PM. Another 13 hour day. Crazy! Tomorrow, we start learning new stuff for the first time! It’s all about data structures for the next 4 days.

What a day! I arrived at Hack Reactor at about 8:20AM to find the 7th floor landing overflowing with new students. There was a lot of excited chatting as we waited for the doors to open so we could take our class photos and get out information packets.

We had brief introductions as everyone went around and shared a fun fact about themselves. Then we dived right into it!

We had lectures that talked about life at Hack Reactor and what to expect over the next 13 weeks and it was full of a lot of stuff like how HR can benefit us over competing career acceleration programs.

They mentioned that some of the goals of Hack Reactor are:

Autonomy: Confidence that you can find a solution

“Some problems are going to suck and are broken on purpose. That’s good for you!”

Make us strong software engineers:
- CS (and software engineering) fundamentals
- Native to web
- JS expertise

How hard is this going to be?

They had a slide that said “Very, very hard.” Then another slide that said “Then think about how hard that is and keep going.” It’s a boot camp!

After the welcome lecture, we started to review the recursion exercise we worked on during our coursework as well as the underbar exercise.

Their strategy is to basically give you a small taste of a topic or idea and then throw you in the deep end of the pool. It’s crazy! This was a lot of folks first experience with pair programming. I feel pretty fortunate to have done this before (thanks to a one-day class at Hack Reactor back in March).

My partner and I clicked really well and we were able to quickly work through rewriting both the recursion and underbar exercises. We were even starting to tackle the extra credit. I’m not saying that to brag, it was just such a great feeling to suddenly understand something and work with someone else who bounced ideas back and forth.

I think that’s going to be one of the biggest things during the program. It’s going to make is more effective communicators and able to know how to solve technical problems. I’m really excited about it!

One thing I noticed is that time REALLY flies. We start working on an assignment, and before I know it, time is up. It’s kind of amazing. I think that’s going to be indicative of how the whole program is going to.

In the evening, we had a mixer with the senior class – these are the people who are starting the second half of the HR program (they are now in week 7). We played a bingo game where we had to match names up with some random and crazy facts that people had previously written about themselves. It was a great way to break the ice.

It seems like there’s a ton of ridiculously friendly, smart, enthusiastic, and positive people in my particular cohort (and enrolled in the program as a whole).

I wrapped up things at around 9:10PM and just hopped on BART to head home. That’s about 13 hours today. Wow. Oh wow!