So this week marks the final chapter in my Ironhack Bootcamp. It’s been a ride, that’s for sure! Last week we started our Final Projects – a web development project of our own choosing and structure. On Friday we present our projects and then on Saturday I head back to Real Life in Montpellier.

No project is the same as another, so it’s a really diverse mix of technologies and approaches. My project is a riff on the AirBnB model but for specialty bicycles and is built on Ruby on Rails with the front-end based on the Foundation framework. My approach was focussed on getting the main back-end functionality completed before beginning the front and that worked pretty well in my case.

My mentor has been very supportive and offered lots of great advice. We’ve worked out a great system where most of his comments are made directly on my github repository so that it’s really easy to connect the comment to the code.

I’ve found that one of the best things I can do is simply to maintain the routine I established over the first six weeks: arriving daily at 9am and trying to take regular breaks during the day. A few of the other students are also practising this, so we make quite a lively group in the mornings until the others begin trickling in later.

It has also been really interesting to see how different people work and the different ways people are struggling and succeeding. I realised that I really miss pair-programming!

So for now that is my quick update. I’ll put up the URL to my app on heroku after the Hackshow and after I’ve had a beer (or three). For now, it’s back to the back-end for some serious refactoring and testing.