First Day of DevBootcamp
Oy vey. I have to write this now in case I forget my first impressions… which were very impressive!

So I rode my bike and arrived disgusting and sweaty. I thought I would have time to change shirts before class but the Starbucks line took forever because there were two PARISIANS in front of me in line. (I recently lived in Paris for 7 months of pure hell). The Parisian girl did not understand why the orange juice comes in a bottle. She got all indignant because she thought the barrista was hiding the fresh orange juice from her because she was French.

By the time I got upstairs to the 7th floor, it was filled with 20+ members of my cohorts, all wearing name tags.

There were two or three really tall Aryans giving out the name tags and saying really exciting things really loud. I could hear the other cohorts inside the DBC room screaming and cheering from the hallway. It was terrifying. I already had a premonition that this was going to be like a new Apple Store opening. Boy, was I RIGHT!

So first, the Olympiads who were handing out tame tags told us to get in order by hair color! I though, “Right. Hilarious joke from every frat movie ever made.” But people actually folllowed there directions and got in order of hair color. I didn’t, though. I just couldn’t allow myself to do that.

They finally opened the door to the room at 8pm sharp. Sure enough we all had to walk in and were greeted by DOZENS of SCREAMING and VERY EXCITED men and women, all standing with their high five positioned hands sticking out.

To say I was terrified would be an understatement.

So I had to walk through this Apple-esque hi-fiving centipede, slapping everyone’s hands as they held their hands up at me, screaming with crazy eyes… everyone.

It was scarier than an Apple Store opening because at an Apple Store, you can just wait until the hi-fiving is over before entering the store if you are crowdophobic or whatever it’s called.

It soon became obvious that I would be experiencing many get-to-know you exercises. We had to do all these “minging” exercises. We had to lock arms with strangers and tell them are most embarrassing moments. Lots and lots of that stuff.

Then we finally sat down in a teacher-students setting and all took turns introducing ourselves to the group…. normal stuff which I can handle without having an anxiety attack.

So things started to get better at that point. My cohort went into a different room and we did an exercise to learn names and at the same time learn about optimization. Not a big deal except it involved throwing and catching a rubber ball. Dodge ball flashbacks.

We learned about the facility, services, structure, etc etc. All good information. I was very impressed that we get yoga twice a week and improve classes too! They also have an on-sight psychologist on staff which we can use all we want.

Good stuff isn’t really interesting so I’ll just skip to food. It was free and from subway but as I was eating a bagel, I was talking to a very nice lady about DBC but I was so nervous, that fat free cream cheese was flying out of the gaps in my teeth as I was talking.

So we got paired up and started working on the mandatory exercises for the day. Anxiety piqued and made me forget everything i learned over the past two months in prep work. My pair was very helpful. I was freaking the fuck out and we got through the exercises but I’ll have to re-do the roman numerals exercise very soon since I didn’t really get it. I get how it worked, I mean, after it was explained to me, but I wasn’t able to figure it out for myself how to solve it.

Working with a partner was probably the hardest thing for the day. I’ve never had to code with another person before.

After finishing the exercises, someone from another cohort said we should not be hard on ourselves on the first day, so I went home at the early hour of 8:30pm. Only a 12.5 hour day!

#whoopee