So I’ve been going through free courses I’ve been finding online because the bootcamp didn’t teach me a whole lot. Right now I’m going through the assignments list for a cornell course on computer science and doing them in javascript.

I know that MIT has a free course and I’ve heard some other ivy league schools allow you to audit their computer science courses and I was going to look into that.

The thing that’s on my mind right now, though, is that in the cornell CS curriculum I found, they mention that the Space Invader assignment actually used to be to create a breakout game but that they had to change it because “the number of Academic Integrity cases had gotten out of hand.”

People cheat. What else is new.

I can go through the material they go through. I can complete the assignments they have to cheat to complete. But I know at the end of their journey, they get a class status symbol. and that matters — despite what people say. I was a peddler and barista for the last four years — I’ll always be looked at differently. I saw plenty of that during my bootcamp experience. Wealthy kids that got help for every step of their projects. My advantage is that I did everything on my own, so I have a slightly more solid base — but my disadvantage is that I just don’t look good on paper. Not a lot of ways around that. I’m thinking that realistically, in the end, I’ll have to go into business for myself. Go back to starbucks or some other place for near minimum wage, make mobile games and slog through upwork on the side.

Anyway.

Here’s the technical tutorial for today:

When using React, don’t access the Dom directly. This causes everything to re-render, if I’m understanding the docs right. Use react refs, instead.