Today was my first day of the software engineering fellowship at Hackbright Academy. Traffic on the way up to SF was not that fun. It was at a standstill in some areas, however I left at 7:45 and made it to the site ahead of the 10 am start. Phew! AND I found a parking garage just down the road that is $10 a day! That was my awesome find of the day and possibly the whole week.
The first day was full of those first day jitters, meeting new people, being in an unfamiliar place. But, it was fine. I re-met a number of women I had met at the dinner before. I met a bunch of new people too. For me, the surprising part is that I am not the only 'old' lady around. I'm not even the oldest. That was a relief and kind of fun.
The ice breaking game was played. I talked to a number of people. I think the one clue involving crackers, mustard, raisins and something else, served with vodka took the prize with me as the most bizarre food eaten. Logistics were covered, the touchy feely tampon talk was given. And then we got into content.
Today, we did 10 mini programming exercises on blockly. Maze #10 was a bitch. My partner and I took a number of tries trying to get the avatar (a block human, astronaut or panda) to the end in the most efficient way possible. But, we kept having issues. Just couldn't get the stupid panda to the end of the maze.
Lunch break. Command line lecture. Back to the maze before working on the command line exercises.
As we were working on the maze, Nick, one of our instructors, mentioned that we didn't have to be efficient, we just needed the avatar to get where it needed to go. Light bulb! We eventually got the code to work in 8 blocks. Yay for us!
Next up, the command line. Both of us had completed the command line exercises waaaay back in the summer, so a lot of it was pretty easy, but there were a few where we both thought, "I don't remember that... why is it doing that?" So, it was a good review.
We finished around 5 or so and had to ask what we should do next. One of the TAs said, "Oh, did you finish #10 on blockly?" We said we had. Then the TA asked, "Did you finish it in 5 blocks of code?"
Holy crap! Really?
Well, we recreated the original code we had, realized that it could be optimized and then started in on the 5 blocks of code. Another TA approached us and gave us a big hint which allowed us to get our 8 blocks down to 5. Yay for us again! (No, I'm not going to spoil the solution for anyone. You all need to figure it out yourselves!).
Following that, we went to project Euler. We zoomed through the first two problems and then got bogged down on the third one. Neither of us could remember how to easily and efficiently factor a huge number. (Both of us are math majors too!). But, since we had about 6 minutes left for our day, we decided to just not deal with it.
On my drive home, I thought about the factorization problem. I think we need to figure out if the factor is prime, first of all. And then if it is a factor of that huge number. There's a bunch of other things too... concatenating a list with the factor as long as it's not already on the list, incrementing to check the next factor and so forth. I'm going to think about it more later... I need to read tonight's homework.
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