I completed my first day of Hack Reactor Remote!

Today was intense. Ever since passing the admissions interview and finishing precourse work, I had been doing a few coding problems on

Codewars as my daily maintenance/code learning. The comparison of class hours from 12pm-11pm (I’m on the east coast) can’t compare to the relaxed hours of self-study.

Thankfully, between big time blocks of learning and pair programming, there’s an hour each of break time for lunch and dinner. While learning and digesting the content of HR, I realized today that making meals and eating them within the hour break may become challenging and so planning ahead a day in advance for meals seems to be a good idea.

As for the general takeaways from the course today, there was technical stuff (like coding, who would have guessed??) but also the introduction of the course. The intro included expectations, course guidelines, and other housekeeping topics.

One repeated word over the course of the day was the idea of autonomy. Autonomy is HR’s main teaching point to students in order to instill a confidence of finding solutions to problems. While all schools and teaching methods generally hand-hold for some time, HR tries to wean off guidance over time so that students eventually become able to solve their own issues, through the use of online resources and the like.

I’ll leave an interesting analogy here to close: HR describes themselves as an eagle in the learning process; instead of handholding through the journey, they become a chasing eagle, urging students over obstacles and mountains and eventually through the job search to become a fully employed software engineer! 🙂 Cheesy, I know, but memorable.