Coding On The Go

While attending Flatiron’s bootcamp writing code is similar to breathing. It’s all you do for 3 months for what seems to be every second of every day. However once you graduate things may change a bit and you may not be coding to that extent . After pushing your brain to the brink of exhaustion it’s understandable to want to take a break and relish in your success. But if you want to qualify for Flatiron’s money back guarantee you have to have a minimum of five git commits a week. Now to some of you you may see that number and think “that’s it, I could code that in my sleep.” Which is what I thought too, but traveling over multiple states and staying with family or sight seeing definitely limits your time. So here’s how I did it, hopefully it helps any future or current alumni if you plan to take a road trip.

First, I recommend setting aside time to code. Whether that’s a fixed hour everyday, or a designated day with a chunk of a few hours set aside. Surprisingly I was the latter, but after going months with a set structure of 8am-5pm for bootcamp it really does help to stay on some kind of a schedule.

Next, figuring out what kind of commits to make to GitHub is very crucial. Flatiron recommends going through old projects from mods one through five and cleaning up your code any way possible. You can do this by utilizing the DRY method, which stands for “Don’t Repeat Yourself,” and eliminating any repetitive code. This is a good idea if you’ve got time to spare because cleaning up your code enough to make a git commit can take a considerable amount of time. Another good idea is adding any new features to existing projects, but again this can be a time consuming task. What I recommend if you’re short on time is to complete old labs that you might not have finished or even redo labs that you’ve already done. It’s great for retaining everything you’ve learned as well as implementing new techniques you’ve picked up up to this point.