So I figured I’d start putting the date in the title so it would make it easier to keep track of. We’ll see how it works.

Today was another doozy. I think they’re all going to be like this, which isn’t bad. Tim and his group of instructors are trying to get us to the Jr. Dev stage of the game in only 12 weeks. Definitely “Drinking from the Firehose” time. We had Cori, a Sr. Consultant spend a little more than an hour with us this morning. She’s the resident Git expert and came in at Tim’s behest since we had so many questions about source control. After her presentation I think we all understood what our commands in powershell were actually doing a bit better than before.

The rest of the day was spent diving into our adventure game and learning about classes, methods, throws, and a handful of other concepts. One of these concepts was inheritance.

Look at that segway into the homework section of the blog!

Inheritance doesn’t seem to be that complicated of a concept (yet. I’m sure it gets way more tricksy the more you know about it). Tim gave us an assignment to pick some items from our kitchen and explain their inheritance as if they were classes being built in Java. The example he gave us was a toaster. A toaster could be considered a descendant of a heating element which could be considered a descendant of an electrical device. Pretty much the idea is that each descendant inherits the traits of it’s parent all the way up the line. This is actually a little harder than anticipated because I feel like it would be cheating to use his example or literally anything else that’s essentially a heating element like an oven or even a stove top.

It might be a stretch, but a refrigerator has the properties of an ice box which has the properties of a cooler (just an insulated box).

Another example might be a blender has the properties of a knife which has the properties of a geometric plane.

That last one might have been a bit too far back on the grandparent side but I feel like we were a bit handicapped removing heating elements from the game! =)

Now that the homework section is over, at the end of the day we had our brains turned inside out by the concept of where exactly things get stored in a computer when you’re writing a program. The example Tim used was age and how where you place a variable or int within the program you’re writing will dictate whether or not it’s stored in the “Stack” or in the “Heap” and if you’ll get a copy of the value or a reference direction into the heap where it is actually stored. It was probably the first concept we’ve gone over that actually confused the heck out of me. By the time we were finished I think I kind of had it, but it’s going to take seeing it a few more times and actually putting it into use for me to grasp it entirely, I think. Either way, exposing us to it now this early on was definitely the right choice since it’s going to be on our minds going forward.

I think that’s all for now folks. I’m going to eat something, give the baby a bath, and pass out. Looking forward to tomorrow!