Back to School

Anyone curious about how Lambda works should check here, they explain it far better than I ever could here.

To give an outsider a little perspective on what a Lambda student does each day, here's a brief outline of a typical day:

9:00 am - career prep lesson/code challenge/peer code review 10:00 am - 12:00 pm - instruction time (guided project) 12:00 pm - 1:00 pm lunch 1:00 pm - 5:00 pm - afternoon project time 5:00 pm - stand up meeting

Austen Allred, the CEO of Lambda School, has also done an excellent video explaining what students do on a regular basis.

Lambda School - Day 1

I'm writing a majority of these daily posts much down the road in retrospect, which is for the best considering the whirlwind of nerves and emotions I encountered during my first few weeks of Lambda School.

Now that I've had ample time to digest and internalize these first few weeks of class, I've been reworking a majority of our original projects and they're coming a lot easier to me. I'm proud of how far I've come.

My memories of the first day are still pretty vivid.

It was rough.

Our cohort started with about 41 new people, a majority of them absolute beginners as far as code is concerned (myself included 100%). A brand new teacher taught our first three weeks. He hadn't been exposed to the Lambda curriculum much and our lessons ran about two hours more than necessary because of that. The material was dense, the teaching style was foreign to me, and I had never completed a functioning app in my life, let along two in one day. The cohort quickly found its numbers dwindling into the low 20's after that initial week. I'm sure there are a multitude of reasons why, surely the most prominent being the sheer difficulty of the week.

Lambda is extremely fluid and adaptable. Since my cohort encountered this particularly trying situation, they quickly added an additional week of material to ease new students from the pre-course work onto the regular iOS core. Going back through it has made me wish that missed out on some catered instruction that would've helped immensely, but I know that my experience has made me into a better developer with greater strength and grit.

If you're an experienced mobile developer/software engineer stumbling across this blog, I apologize in advance for any misconceptions or incorrect statements I make on this blog. My purpose in writing is to document my learnings, and I'd want anyone who comes across this content to be able to get a base-level understanding of it.

iOS developers predominantly use Swift as a coding language in writing mobile apps. Objective-C, an older coding language slightly patterned around C, is still more widely used now in Apple apps and software, but will likely become eclipsed by Swift due to its convenience and ease of use. I recently started to dabble in Objective-C in my Lambda classes, and my appreciation for Swift has grown a lot after being exposed to the older style. Lambda's 15 weeks of core iOS instruction consists of about 13 weeks of Swift, and 2 weeks of Objective-C at the end. If you're intereste in any of the curriculums of Lambda's tracks, you can find lots of insightful information about them here

We worked on the "Master-Detail" pattern of a lot of mobile apps on the first week. A majority of the applications on any given phone will use this pattern in some form or another. A "master" list displays a long view of related information, and certain rows or sections can be selected that will take you to a "detail" page showing more information on that particular item. The most notable of this pattern would be a contacts app, where you can select someone's name cell to pull up information about their full name, phone number, email, etc.

This is the first ever app I built completely by myself from scratch! Of course, I always have access to help from project managers and instructors at Lambda, and a majority of the assignments have detailed instructions on how to build out the skeleton of the application. Even though it looks so simple looking back now on this assignment, I'm really proud of how it turned out!

Because I've come to realize that writing about every individual day of Lambda class would be incredibly daunting and time-consuming, I've decided to write two posts each week: one that focuses on the Sprint Challenge of each week on Friday -- the effective "test" to see if you internalized Monday-Thursday's instruction, and another that details my favorite project of the week (I figured it would be pretty unlikely the sprint project would be my favorite of the week haha).

Well, this post has been sort of a dry and long-winded one. In future entries, I want to focus more on the projects and less on the narrative of the day. I'm excited to hopefully one day look back and see the curation of plenty of wonderful accomplishments I've made thanks to Lambda and my teachers there.

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