It’s Tuesday following my third week at Tech Elevator. Week 3 added complexity to the coursework, but it continues to get more interesting! We learned about concepts in Agile Software development and Object Oriented Programming (OOP).
In addition to the coursework, Tech Elevator provided a couple of events to help the students’ career searches. On Monday, they hosted four senior software developers who gave us industry advice, and told us about their experiences. Then on Tuesday, executives from a company called Improving Enterprise bought everybody lunch and presented us with information about their company. After the presentation, we were encouraged to mingle with the executives. These meetings are called ‘showcases,’ and Tech Elevator will host eight of them throughout the bootcamp. Each company who hosts a showcase will be part of Tech Elevator’s ‘matchmaking events,’ which are like the job interview version of speed dating.
So far the career opportunities presented by Tech Elevator are impressive; it’s no wonder they tout a 98% placement rate. I met a couple of great people from Improving Enterprise, and look forward to seeing them at the matchmaking events.
My new knowledge of object oriented programming has changed the way I think of the term ‘object-oriented.’ After taking classes online, I thought of it as a simple adjective to describe languages that treat all things as objects; you can create and manipulate the objects throughout your program. While this is true, there’s a lot more to it. When programmers use the term ‘object-oriented,’ they are referring to the concept of breaking a project into smaller pieces by defining abstract items as objects, which eliminates complexity, and allows them to design programs more efficiently. An object is defined by creating a section of code called a class. Without getting into language specifics, we need to think about object-oriented programming by asking ourselves questions like: What is the program we are trying to create? What are the items which make up the program? And how are the items related with respect to ‘is a’ or ‘has a’ classification? These questions will allow us to eliminate dependencies and design efficient programs which use the key tenets of object-oriented programming; encapsulation, inheritance, and polymorphism.
I’m still considering projects to work on throughout the bootcamp. Right now the coursework is too demanding to work on anything extracurricular; on Sunday I was up until one o’clock in the morning doing schoolwork, and yesterday I worked until about nine o’clock at night. Over the weekend I had a conversation with a business owner who needs a tool to send files back and forth between his locations, so I could design a web application for him. However, I still want to pursue my passion project, which is the Google Chrome Extension that verifies online news sources. More updates on this to come.
Thanks for reading! If you have any questions for me please reach out: joeosterfeld@gmail.com