Today will be my second hackathon inside the iOS stack. Our cohort will be given a theme for a project and 7 hours to complete our idea and present. These have been a great way to get a feel for what I expect actual development to feel like. Working together with others to create something interesting can be a good learning experience.

I’ve spent the last few weeks working in Xcode, learning how mobile applications are made. I’ve really enjoyed being able to run assignments on my iPhone and see what the process looks like for creating apps on iOS. There are a lot of new ideas and systems to learn, but it has felt slightly easier than Django. Some of the projects we’ve created have been exciting to see come together. Early on, we had to create a sort of tip calculator. Seeing how Swift could be used to perform different math problems instantly based on input was really cool. I look forward to having enough free time to just play around with some project ideas.

Next week will be project week for this stack, and I hope to be able to show something that I’ve built on here. I’m still kicking around a few ideas on what to build, but I’m sure it will be a fun process.

For now, I’m just trying to absorb as much information as I can, as my job upon exiting Coding Dojo will be as an iOS developer. Hopefully I will be set up to succeed when I’m finished here.

The MEAN stack is next month. It seems to be commonly accepted that MEAN is one of the harder stacks. I hope that some concepts I’m learning now will make next month a little easier.

Onward!