Week 7 at gSchool: Guest Speakers and Weekend Trips

Cameron Buckingham is a student at gSchool, a 6-month coding school in Colorado. He blogs each week about his experience at gSchool- here, he talks about working with CRUD and how gSchool is keeping Cameron sane and fit with tubing trips and hikes!

Remember, the Course Report community is eligible for a $500 scholarship to gSchool!

After digesting SQL commands and working with basic CRUD these past couple of weeks we moved into more complex commands and CRUD structure. As I mentioned in my last post, SQL commands are commands that I can give to Postgres in order to access database information. Once a database has been established and joined with the app then users can start logging in and performing user-only functions. Logging in is just the tip of the iceberg; a developer can establish a database for almost anything such as maintaining login preferences, calculating commerce transactions, or developing a metric monitoring system. 

The amount of outside speakers and lecture-based talks has increased as well. What I am most excited for next week is to start working with Rails. Up until now we have only used Sinatra to stage all our applications. Sinatra is an excellent tool to help publish sites onto the web, but has its limitations. From my understanding, rails is seen to have more fluidity and a higher functionality for implementing more complex ideas.

As a requirement for the completion of this course, the instructors require us to have a least one personal project of our choosing completed by the end of the course. It can be any complex site that involves multiple techniques and tools that we learned in class. We are set to give demos on our progress this friday on all the work we have done so far. I am super excited for this because I feel that I have a good idea, but that is not what excites me. I am just happy to already (only 7 weeks in) have the knowledge to build out the framework for the site. That is what is super cool to me!

Another great thing about gSchool is their built-in social activities. It is important as a programmer to get out every once and a while. It is easy to get lost in a problem and forget there is a beautiful world full of people to meet and experiences to be had. Last week we went tubing in Boulder and this next week we will be doing a group trip to Pike's Peak down in Colorado springs to summit our first 14er. 

More to come in two weeks.