Weeknotes - 01 Makers PreCourse
Tags: bootcamp, weeknotes, talks
Published: 2019-05-05 16:19:55

---
title: Weeknotes - 01 Makers PreCourse
published: true
description: Looking back on the week gone.
tags: bootcamp, weeknotes, talks
series: Makers weeknotes
---

## Makers Lift Off!

This was a momentous week, wherein I began the PreCourse for Makers[^1]. :tada:  The cohort & coaches got acquainted on Slack, and I found out that climbing is a Big Thing.  
I had a video chat about the process and my options as a Fellow with Careers Manager at Makers, Lauren. :wave:

### Course Content & Challenge

This week was largely about getting the environment set up, plus getting familiar with a broad range of Command Line and Git commands.  A murder mystery[^2] - solved in the command line - reinforced frequently used commands that will be useful in the coming weeks (and ...life).  It felt as if I whizzed through the content as it wasn't unfamiliar, and I really enjoyed the practise of the challenge.  By Thursday I'd dived into next weeks' Ruby mastery syllabus. 

### Debugging
Problem solving is a Bigger Thing than climbing, so I made some notes on the debugging process[^3],

 - Extract info from the error message :honeybee:
 - Find the first wrong line :mag:
 - Get visibility of the issue :eye:
 - Fix the bug when the problem is understood :heavy_check_mark:

## CityJS Conference

I was happy to be given a ticket via codebar[^4] to the CityJS conf[^5] in London!  I really enjoyed the variety and quality of the talks.  A lot went over my head; I've probably written a total of 4 lines in JS to date... but, it wasn't a barrier to many of the concepts/presentations.  

### Speaker highlights 

 - I enjoyed Chris Heilmann's[^6] talk, he mentioned the variety of considerations and trade-offs to consider when seeking accessibility. 
 - Shrishtika Neelakantam's[^7] description of the evolution of web services was enjoyable, informative and, beautiful.  
 - I want to explore getting the right _syntactic sugar_ balance following Maya Shavin's[^8] talk.

## Misc.

 - Shout out to Dan Barrett[^9], my weeknotes inspo :raised_hands:
 - Spending a whole day viewing talks left me in a lot of pain.  I'd love to get some tips from anyone else who suffers physical postural pain?  My two cents: always have pain-killers and sunglasses
 - I'm concerned about the impact of conference freebies on the environment...
 - Giving unsolicited editorial feedback is very _on brand_ but does it make me seem tOo InTeNsE?


# Weeknotes Notes
[^1]: **Makers** | [website](https://makers.tech/)
[^2]: **Mary Rose Cook**, _How to debug your code: wring the error message, tighten the loop and get visibility_
[^3]: **Noah Veltman**, _The Command Line Murders_ | [GitHub](https://github.com/veltman/clmystery) | [website](https://noahveltman.com/)
[^4]: **codebar** | [website](https://codebar.io)
[^5]: **CityJS Conference** | [website](https://cityjsconf.org/home)
[^6]: **Chris Heilmann**, _`<feTurbulence> && !important`_ | [@codepo8](https://twitter.com/codepo8)
[^7]: **Srushtika Neelakantam**, _The current state of the data sharing economy_ |  [@shrushtika](https://twitter.com/Srushtika)
[^8]: **Maya Shavin**, _Syntactic sugar - Diabetes alert_ | [@MayaShavin](https://twitter.com/MayaShavin)
[^9]: **Dan Barrett** | [@dasbarrett](https://twitter.com/dasbarrett)


<sub>This post was edited to with footnote support Jun 2019</sub>