It was an AWESOME first day!  First we introduced ourselves and got advice from the other cohorts.  Then some team building exercises and lunch.  Finally, CODING (pair programming specifically)!

My roommates and me coded from 3pm until midnight.  It was great to do some pair programming as we solved the exercises considerably faster.

I learned a couple interesting tidbits yesterday:

  • nil is an instance of the NilClass which like most classes inherits from Object.  This means that you can pass Object methods to nil.  So what do you think happens when you pass .to_s method to nil?
  • recursion can make code look cleaner, but can be slower than loops because it generally requires a memory address to be pushed to the stack so the program can return to that point.
  • Listen to your pair programmer and let him/her drive whenever possible.