This post is a bit late; I meant to write it yesterday but I’ve been on a bit of a tight schedule this past week. The fact that I’m writing this on my train ride home is a good indicator of how much free time I’ve had.

That said, my first week at Hack Reactor was amazing. I’m a Bay Area native but the magic of San Francisco isn’t lost on me. It’s one of my favorite cities and I love having the excuse to spend the majority of my time at the HR HQ on Market Street.

Speaking of magic, one of my classmates described the Hack Reactor Week 1 experience perfectly: in her words, it feels “a lot like how Harry Potter must have felt when he first began attending Hogwarts.” I couldn’t have said it better! With how positive the atmosphere is I feel perfectly confident that I’ll be a coding wizard in a matter of weeks.

Since it’s my first week I’ll try to detail what my daily routine has been like, and how I’ve been adjusting to the rigorous schedule here.

I’m up bright and early around 6:30 to prepare for my hour-long commute into the city. I grew up in Fremont and take the BART into SF from there. Many of my classmates found housing in the city, but just as many are taking routes similar to mine. After all, rent in the city is notoriously high. So far, the commute hasn’t been much of a problem, and I actually really enjoy having an hour to mentally prepare/unwind (/write blog posts I should have already written).

The first week is about 50% orientation lectures, getting to know each other and reviewing the Hack Reactor precourse material, so it’s a bit of a misnomer compared to the rest of the program. Or so I hear from my seniors, AKA the cohort that started a mere six weeks before me. We share a floor with them, and in my first week I’ve had the opportunity to talk to many of them and absorb their wisdom about the program and coding in general. It’s encouraging to see how much they’ve learned in such a short period of time, and gives me a little preview of where I’m headed.

The other half of our week was spent coding, as one would expect. While there are some instances where I’m coding on my own, the majority of the time I’m paired up with one of my classmates working on two-day long ‘sprints’. This is the real meat of the program, and as we move into week 2 we’re spending significantly more time working at our pairing stations. More on that in a later post.

Our week 1 sprints consisted of reviewing precourse material (Monday/Tuesday) and data structures(Wednesday-Saturday). I’ve had prior experience working with basic data structures (albeit in Java rather than JS), but there was still a good deal for me to learn, both technical and soft skills. Our class leads and lecturers have done a fantastic job of easing us into the basic structure of the course.

Hack Reactor ends at 8 offically, though many stay after to either work on code or attend one of the many guest speaker events. I generally head home no later than 9 in order to get home in time to get some sleep. Lather, rinse, repeat. As the seniors say, I’m still in the honeymoon phase, but I’m really looking forward to exploring the curriculum and facing all the challenges along the way.