It’s been quite a while since our last blog post.

In fact, the bootcamp group finished their classwork and client projects in September!

We’re now 4 weeks into Software Development Foundations with Ruby and Rails.

I’m the instructor for the course and I’m exceedingly pleased with the students and the progress thus far.

This week we’re wrapping up the first unit of the course. So far, we’ve covered:

• Software project lifecycles
• The basics of Unix
• Exploring irb
• How Objects work
• Fixed vs. Floating point numbers
• Ruby Syntax
• Basic version control with git
• How to read stack traces
• The math of software development (modulus, big oh, etc.)
• Data Structures (Arrays, Hashes, Maps, Trees, Networks, etc.)
• UML as a communication tool
• Test Driven Development (from day one. red-green-refactor, ftw)
• Searching and Sorting algorithms
• Date/Time math
• Magic Numbers/Strings
• Requirements
• Code Review
• Pair Programming
• Refactoring

We’ve also implemented some awesome (to me, at least!) exercises:

• Cheers (a warm-up for command-line I/O)
• The Ruby Koans
• Singly Linked Lists
• Doubly Linked Lists
• Sorting/Searching Singly Linked Lists
• Unix cal (the subset of months/years between 1800 and 3000)
• Conway’s Game of Life

All of this with students that (for the most part) didn’t even know HTML a mere 4 months ago!