The Finley Code

UT Bootcamp - Day 1

Nigel Finley -

Day one of UT Bootcamp has come and gone and it was a success. The jitters of day one anxiety and first impressions have passed so now we can get to the real stuff - web development.

The intro class was broken down into a few parts:

Why Web Development?

This was the big question our Career Director, Jeremey Bergeron, asked during his welcome message..."Why Web Development and Why Are You Here?"

This struck a chord with me because I think development and programming careers can be chosen for the wrong reasons. Sure, the rumor that there is more money in this field (can't confirm from personal experience yet) is one that is definitely a motivating factor and is partially true for me. But changing careers just for the money will make your career short lived so there has to be additional motivators. From what all of the instructors mentioned in their intros, programming is hard. So no matter what the reason(s) for crossing into the programming world, it can't be money alone and should include a strong desire and hunger to learn new and challenging things and not be afraid to fail...a lot. As Brian said during his talk there are two things that are required to learn code:

  1. Persistence in the face of unbelievable challenges and;
  2. Maintaining self-confidence at all costs.

For me, why am I here? Change of career, opportunity to earn more money (I mean who doesn't want this opportunity), but most importantly my desire to learn a new subject matter and build/create/invent platforms that solve everyday problems and increase efficiencies (check my earlier post Who Am I And Why A Blog?). Also, the teacher and good Samaritan deep down wants to learn how to develop software to give humanity the tools to make our lives better and our earth a better place to live. I know that sounds lofty, but you have to have goals right?

Another reason addressing, the 'why' is due to my current job. Currently, I am responsible for overseeing the licensing platform implementation of an entirely new build of our content management system. I have been working very closely with our developers, seen their programming environments, figured out ways to articulate my needs, tested in QA and demo environments, pulled reports via SQL, and (here's the kicker) asked for things that seem unattainable (at least given budget and timeframe). So I thought how cool would it be if I could write the requirements and code necessary to fulfill my own requests to help out the team. I have always believed if there is a will there is a way, so let's do this.

Terminal Basics

After inward pensive thought provoked by Jeremy, Bryan Doyal, our faithful instructor, from BioWare, taught us basics in the command line. See below for a short list of quick basics on Terminal from class.

pwd = Present Working Directory (ie: /Users/nigelfinley)
~ = your home directory
cd+ directory_name=Change Directory
ls= List the files in the current directory
-all = A flag which is indicated by the -
ls -all=List all of the files in the directory
TAB= Auto completes current command
UP ARROW = Show history
.. = One level up
mkdir+directory_name = Create directory
touch + filename= Create a file
open + filename = Open a file
mv+ filename = Move a file
rm+ filename= Remove a file (when you use this command your files is gone forever, so be careful!)
rm -r +directory_name = Delete a directory and everything inside. The -r stands for recursive.

Play around and experiment with these commands...ALWAYS BE CODING!! Just be very careful when using the rm command as you cannot undo this command.

After Terminal, we continued with a brief foray into HMTL very similar to our pre-work assignment Pre-Work Blog Post.

So with that, one class down and 6 months to go.

Shout Outs