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!