The tiny bit of Hack Reactor/git humor above is going to be lost on most of my audience but it made me happy. This week felt a bit like the first week of the program. A bit of uncertainty, a lot of excitement.

We were turned loose this week. No more structured lessons, it’s the start of the projects phase. The first two days were devoted to a “hackathon” where I learned angular and firebase and created a bookmarking app that included full-text search and a companion Chrome extension. That was super exciting. It was awesome to build something with my own two hands and realize all that I’ve learned in the past six weeks. Even if something didn’t work right off the bat, I now have the confidence to read through the documentation and understand what individual pieces weren’t functioning the way I expected them to. One of my best strengths has definitely been my super-human ability to craft a google search query.

The rest of the week has been a move into group projects and learning a whole new skill-set. I’m a get-along kind of person by nature and it was hard at first for me to feel like I wasn’t stepping on toes when I wanted to work on a specific part of our project. After a day or so of planning and modeling what we wanted to do though, it became easier to split up tasks. I learned Asana (a project tracking app) and got really good at dividing up tasks.

My favorite part of our new app is that I got to deep dive into d3 (a JavaScript library for data visualizations) functionality and create a homegrown heat-map. Some of my notes are up on GitHub, but I plan on refactoring and creating a whole post on the heat-map process (spoiler: d3.rollup is my savior).

I am very content this week. I’m getting a taste of what the real world is going to look like for me as a software engineer (an unfortunate side effect is that I’m getting a real taste for coffee to keep up with the long Hack Reactor hours). Now though, I’m sitting in SFO waiting for my plane to PDX and home for Christmas. I’ll miss the beautiful (and non-rainy) sites of San Francisco, but I’m excited to visit family and show them how much I’ve changed.