Breakfast was amazing. Anytime you can get unlimited bacon is a great way to start. We got lunch for free as well! Packed sandwiches allowed us to pick from many different kinds of subs. I was happy that we had a chance to pick our rooms for the workshop. I did not understand really what each room was nor did I know what would be a good fit but I was able to pick a room so that was cool. The presenters were fantastic. They were patient and had great delivery. I felt comfortable with them immediately. They walked around and made sure that everyone had a chance to get help if they needed it. Once I realized I was in over my head in the first workshop I was able to quickly move into another workshop that had some of our students in it. I started off in the animation workshop and I moved into the testing workshop. I saw a few other Iron Yard students there which made it more appealing for me to go into. I sat out the afternoon session as I just couldn't sit for another three plus hours going over advanced topics today. That was one of the best decisions I have ever made. I was able to do some research and begin my homework. The workshop went over branches in github. We went to their github page and forked it. We were then supposed to download and run some other programs that didn't quite work for me. The main topic was discussing testing your website in many different environments. We went over the best thing that you can do is to actually own the hardware and run each one in many different environments. They talked about how they try to have an android device, an IOS device, a kindle fire, a tablet, and pc's running IE, firefox, and chrome. If you cannot own all the hardware and software we discussed how to do that through different web pages. Some of the pages were free and some charge a fee. They even discussed how you could in a pinch go to a cellphone store and try to pull up your webpage using different devices to see how it shows up.
I was frustrated that I wasn't able to get the simple commands to work to start in github. I saw how much time we were taking up trying to catch up to the people that paid to be here and I felt too guilty to have them come over to help me. If this had been our class I would have not had a problem asking for help and getting on the same page as everyone else. While I was able to understand some concepts I really felt frustrated to be "stuck" in a room listening to advanced concepts for @ 3 hours. It is quite possible that I would have really enjoyed this workshop in a year or two from now. It is very interesting to see how different the front end is from the back end. Time is so precious to me at this point in my life between The Iron Yard, my wife, my daughters, commuting to St. Pete, etc.
Useful Tools:
http://emmet.io - plugin for editor that adds shorthand for generating code? http://gruntjs.com/ - javascript task runner http://handlebarsjs.com/ - modular markup