I remember my first day at Turing. I walked into the doors of the Guarantee Bank building, and followed a person wearing a green jacket into the basement. I kept my mind on the goal. I wanted to become a software developer in the next several months. I knew everyone there wanted to do the same. Little did I know that I would work with some of the brightest and most motivated individuals that I have met in a long time. We would also meet for happy hours, and celebrate success and failure all together.
The first module of Turing lasted six weeks. We focused on the fundamentals of computer programming in Ruby. The concepts were hard. I couldn't believe that I was asked to build an auto-complete tree just seven working days in. We had pairing projects and individual projects, each harder than the last. Through it all though, it has made me more confident in not only my own coding ability, but everyone else's around me. The best part is having the person next to you, push you to do more than you think you can do. Everything was at least 20% above our ability, but it made you better.
Lastly, I would have to say my favorite project was building the game of BattleShip in a REPL interface. It was hard with a lot of work, but I ended using so many different algorithms and problem solving approaches in the same project. I built a method that recursively placed the computer's ships on the board. I built methods that verfied valid ship placement positions via the use of enumerables on the board, which I built using a 2D array. Would I build it the same way again? I doubt it, but it taught me a lot. Oh, and the algorithms helped me scale the game to larger board sizes too!