The first weekend challenge of my Ronin course at Makers Academy was intended to test several topics seen during the 4 weeks of PreCourse and the first week of course.

The main topics were:

• Command line
• Ruby
• Object-Oriented Programming (OOP)
• Git and GitHub
• RSpec
• Test-Driven Development (TDD)

The goal of the first weeks’ workshops was understanding the benefits of TDD while building a simple application that controls the flow of planes at an airport. You can see my work here.

These are the skills that I acquired after this week:

• Better pair-programming: Instead of focussing only on progress and results, I changed my approach to concentrate on the learning objectives of the group. The first sessions were very exhausting because I tried to work as if I was alone. Each pair partner is a completely different world, and the rhythm and difficulty of each session must be adapted according to our strengths and weaknesses.

• Ruby: Putting in practise some SOLID principles in my code, such as the Single Responsability Principle. The code I have done is flexible, which means that it is easy to change because each class is not dependent on other classes. I learnt the idea behind Dependency Injection, a software design pattern that implements inversion of control for resolving dependencies.

• RSpec: In just one week I have used a huge amount of RSpec matchers to test my applications. I feel more comfortable with my tests and the syntax.

• External tools: In addition to all the the topics listed above, I used Travis CI, Hound and Coveralls during the development cycle of this application. These tools will be used during the full course and I found them very useful to check if my code fulfills the business requirements in terms of test coverage and style.