Bootcamp - First Week Wrapup
in Metis
We have concluded the First Week! Yay!
The pace has been brutal. Many of us are extremely sleep deprived.
I was up very late last night forcing myself to incorporate the geo-data. I then fought through library installation (and a bit of library debugging) to be able to follow some examples I’ve seen on the web. I got a basic heat map going. It’s almost meaningless for our purposes. But it’s good for street cred - it impressed some of my peers. Several were only barely behind me. Shortly after I got there this morning Tiffany asked me about her troubles installing basemap. I “slacked” her the command lines I used to install that and half-a-dozen other modules.
Oh yeah… on that… they weren’t kidding we DO use Slack a ton. But we use it for work even more than for the lessons or other messaging. It doesn’t replace email. It’s just a very convenient way to do a quick-and-dirty cut-and-paste of a URL, a code snippet, a file, etc. For a lot of things, there’s no point to say “look at this”. Why waste the other person’s time making them get up and walk around the table. They’re busy; you’re busy. You use half-your brain to cut-and-paste to answer a peer’s question while they’re wrestling with their problem and you’re struggling with yours.
At 5pm, we segued into a Social for a couple of hours. Light snacks, booze and some goofy games. This stuff is important too. Many of us are competitive. Many of us are presumptuous, even precocious. We’re often criticizing each other’s work and even arguing over methodology. It is very helpful to simply chill out and even be silly.
The first Week concluding aligns more or less with the first Project concluding. I had to chuckle when I came across some of the curriculum/guideline that explained when the first project would truly be over. It’s over when you blog about it. Chuckle… OK. It would be silly to claim the fact I had that project set up on my blog within hours of the beginning of the project means I’ve already met that requirement. But I’ve been blogging about the project.
However, we had our lesson on blogging today.
And I’m horrified.
Let me explain… if I thought earlier that having gotten the blog out of the way ahead of time would mean I would have more “free time”, this was slightly incorrect. Why? Well… because there wasn’t that much time in the day where I could have just ignored the lecture. But that’s not what terrifies me. No… what scares me is reflecting that the contrast between the other students getting a short lecture on blogs despite time required to get a good one going is the same sort of thing I’m going to face shortly on other aspect such as Stats. Coupled with the rapid pace on other topics, it’s clear I may have been right to believe things would get tough after the first couple of weeks.
Oh well… time to gird my loins.
And doggone it if I didn’t actually catch a blog bug today anyway. During the lecture on Visualization, the declaration of what or Presentation should be made me think. We are expected to create a slide presentation. Well… I thought this is exactly what would look good on the blog. Yeah, sure it would be sufficient all on its own. But it would be sweet if I could add that functionality…
Yup. So sure enough, I’ll be working on my blog anyway! Just like everyone else.