Hack Reactor Week 1

This is it! The first week at Hack Reactor, and what an awesome experience it has been.

We started the first day with an introduction to the program, touched on both our expectations and the expectations of Hack Reactor, and did a review “sprint” on recursion.

Sprints are short projects often worked on with a pair, this is at the core of Hack Reactor’s teaching style and philosophy.

Recursion

Recursion is a technique for solving problems where a function makes calls to itself. This allows the program to solve small parts of the problem at a time, leaving the rest for the recursive calls.

Code Reuse

We discussed a variety of code reuse patterns. The patterns include functional, functional-shared, prototypal and psuedoclassical.

Data Structures

The first week involved discussion and implementation of various data structures. We first started with implementation of stacks and queues. During the rest of the week, we focused on more advanced data structures, such as linked lists, trees, graphs, sets, and binary search trees.

One of the most surprising things about Hack Reactor was the amount of thorough and thoughtful video lectures on “soft skills” to help with both the program and becoming an effective learner and programmer.