It hit me today that I (potentially) only have three weeks left of Dev BootCamp. In those three weeks, I will learn Rails, which is a very powerful Ruby framework and the whole reason I’m here. I’ll also learn more advanced JavaScript and some new AJAX calls inside Rails. After an assessment in the middle of next week, I’ll have a final project to work on and present. Then, the real work begins. I’ll actually have to find a job that will allow me to continue to develop my skills.

Today was once again action packed, and once again not a whole lot was accomplished. We met the new Phase 1 cohort, introductions were made, food was devoured, some quick lessons were given to the Phase 2 cohort by the Phase 3 cohort, and an intro to Rails lecture was given. All this before lunch. After lunch, we had another lecture and a code-along with our instructor on how the Rails framework builds itself out.

I have to be honest, I’m a little suspicious of a framework that does everything for you. In Sinatra, Every action was deliberate. You had to tell the framework exactly what you wanted to build and what relationship it should have with the other files. With Rails, you type one thing and all relationships are ready and waiting for you. It’s really neat, and I can see why so many web apps are made with it, but it’s a little disconcerting not knowing every detail of what’s being built, and not having much room to customize the build process.

After the lecture, we went to work on the week’s challenge, which is to recreate the Stack OverFlow website using Rails. Each section has us adding new pages and functionality, the ability to post questions and have answers assigned to those questions, etc. We’ll be presenting our work on Friday, so hopefully there will be enough time.

Another part of this phase is Thunder Talks. We’ll each pick a topic that we’re interested in, form groups, and present a brief lecture on that topic. I chose non-Heroku deployment, mainly because I wanted to see what other options are out there for hosting my web app. I may end up changing my mind to another one that would have me researching FireBase, which is something I want to use in my final project.

On a personal note, I was a little disappointed in myself that fear was the first emotion I felt when confronted with the Assessment next week and the work we have to do before then. I’m so worried about messing up that I’m not taking time to appreciate the fun and exciting part, which is that I’m creating something from scratch and making it available to the world. I hope I can get over that fear and focus on actually enjoying myself.

Until tomorrow, I’m Edwin Unger and I’m a web developer in training.