Coding Boot Camp Week 0

As I begin a new chapter in my life I felt it would be beneficial to document my experience in this blog.  Beneficial to who? I don’t know but here I am typing anyway.

Allow me to introduce myself.  My name is Adam, I turned thirty this past December.  I had been working at USPS as a letter carrier for almost three years when I decided it was finally time for a change.  Well if I am to be completely honest my wife is the one who brought the Coding Boot Camp to my attention and I was at a point in my career where I thought anything had to be better than what I was doing at the moment so I jumped at the opportunity.  So for better or for worse I have to thank my wife for this endeavor that I am about to embark on.

I’m feeling excited  for what lies ahead.  I’m excited to be challenged in ways that I haven’t been challenged in for a long time.  But delusions of grandeur aside this three month boot camp isn’t going turn me into the next Mark Zuckerberg.  My loving wife will be the sole income provider for both us for the next three months.  Upon completion I’ll be thrown into a highly competitive workforce where I’ll constantly need to improve, which I guess isn’t such a bad thing.  But what I’m trying to get at is, although I do have a general feeling of excitement, the uncertainty of what the future has in store for me is definitely concerning, especially financially.  I consider myself to be an optimist so let us not dwell on the uncertainties of the future, rather let us focus on the task at hand.

My pre-work assignments… which I am currently taking a break from in order to write this.  Before you label me a procrastinator let’s not forget how beneficial this blog is going to be.  Anyway, it isn’t so bad.  I enjoy the problem solving that’s involved in the assignments.  Probably because the problems are still easy enough for me to solve.  I was particularly satisfied with completing the assignment that had us coding in Scratch.  For the uninitiated, Scratch is a coding language developed by MIT to help get kids, and adults,  into programming.  The assignment wanted me to create a game with the following parameters:

• Users can move the cat left and right with the arrow keys.
• Users can press the space bar to shoot a projectile.
• Mice fall from the sky at random locations.
• If a mouse reaches the bottom, the player loses a life.
• If the player shoots a mouse, the mouse is deleted, and the player gets a point.
• Once a player reaches 0 life, they lose.

Voilà! A Game of Cat and Mouse

I think this is a good place to end my first post.  The image below was a default image provided by WordPress.  I was going to delete it and add something of my own or nothing at all, but upon further consideration I find the image to be very appropriate.  The future is bright, the sea is calm (for now), and who knows what lies beneath the surface!