I have just finished the first week of the pre-course for the Makers Academy.

It started out with some reading material about command line functions, going on to explore github features and optimisation. To say it was like reading a foreign language initially was an understatement. I was staring at commands on a screen which returned memories of being 5 years old trying to navigate MS-DOS on my old man's state of the art pc (at the time anyway...).

After i battled the initial overwhelming feeling, i pushed forward and was amazed at how the information quickly stuck, and before long i could navigate, create and delete a range of files and functions, zipping through my computer files and searching for very specific entires at my own will.

The next step shocked me more, git. what on earth was a git? And why does it have a github? I guess i never really thought about the ability to back up your work, work remotely, and collaborate on projects with others. After reading about the principals and uses of this, it quickly became clear this was something i would need heavily for the course at Makers, and also my career as a developer. I pushed through setting up an SSH key to my remote repo, and managed to push and pull my files back and forth between my local repo and my shiny new remote repo.

All of this new knowledge was then put to the test with the first weeks challenge - The command line mystery. This was a surprisingly cool test to see if you could search, create and decipher files that were downloaded from the remote repo, and then push them back and forth with all the correct information necessary to reach the next step. This was a great experience to put all i had learnt into practise.

I relaxed the rest of the weekend and reflected on what i had learnt, and how after only a week i had already succeeded in learning something i never knew existed a week ago!

Today i am meeting some of my cohort students which i am excited about, and we will attend a lecture on the Github topics to hopefully further reinforce the learnings of last week. After that it looks to be more Ruby based challenges for the next two weeks.

Wish me luck!