Pairing up with Gina!

Wow, what a fun, great experience to pair up with Gina to work on Euler #9. Despite some setbacks along the way, I feel like I have learned more in the four hour session than what I did in a week or two on my own. My learning style seems to revolve around directly applying what I have learned (whether it’s building something or sovling problems - my hands need to be doing something) and communicating what I have learned (whether that is in the form of writing my blog post, teaching someone, etc.).

Today’s Tasks

• Pair programming w/Gina!
  • Euler #9
• Apprentice Meetup - Gina, Tatiana and myself

Challenges

• Being faithful to the three fundamentals of TDD
• Making sure to write a sufficient number of tests
• Not jumping too far ahead in production code - writing just enough to pass the failing test

TIL

• The cascading effect of TDD in the context of getting your helper functions passing all the tests and how that spillovers to other tests that have dependecies on the fully-tested helper functions.
• The awesome concept of the inverse relationship between your production code and testing code. i.e. as your tests become more specific, the prod code becomes more general, vice-versa.
• Spending extra time to refactor & optimize the code because it would take 2-3 mins to get the test results!!

FriYay + (preemptively gonna call) Week 4 ✓

Wow, a month has gone by and my mind is blown away in terms of how much I have learned so far. If I am being 100% honest with myself I have not even put in my full effort and focus into this yet. With all these great resources surrounding me, having an awesome mentor (Micah) & a great team (thanks Gina!!, Nick, Tatiana & Tadd) I honestly feel like the sky is the limit when it comes to how much I can grow in the upcoming months. This first month was a great learning experience filled with success, failures, eureka moments, frustrations, doubts, etc.

But yeah, to conclude today’s blog: LFG MONTH ONE ✓