Code Clan - Week 2
Now I have slept on it and had a few hours not coding, I do think the first week was successful although it was super stressful and frustrating I feel refreshed and ready to start the new week stuffing more information inside my head.
From the stand up that we do every morning a lot of my fellow Coders had a few issues which were the same as me. Although I completely understand their frustrations, I am super happy that it wasn't just me. It does feel like that sometimes...
I'm not the kind of person who needs constant confirmation of how I am doing but I have felt a bit on the low side of the scale thinking it was only just me struggling so felt the need to ask how do the instructors think I am doing, The answer of "Exactly how the majority of the students are on their first week" surprised me as like I said, I felt really overwhelmed and ready to cry on Thursday/Friday, but it's a new week and I think I am ready to take on what's thrown at me.
note - I am writing these blog entries during the short breaks we have so i'd call this a real time insight to what i'm feeling while working through each class. My grammar may be slightly off as i'm writing this on different days ect but i'm more writing this for myself so I can see how I have improved and to help anyone who wants to do the Code Clan course to see how you may feel. Its different for every student and this is a personal insight into what it's like to sit the course from only my perspective.
Day 1 - Object Oriented Programming - Classes
Classes
- Understand the concept of OOP,
- Create a Class
- Instantiate an object from our class
- Understand the difference between classes and objects
- Add properties to a class
- Add Behaviours and modifiers to our class
- Getter and Setter Methods - used to access data , setter for outside world to change the data
Overall feeling today is positive, I feel that I am noticing things/ bugs in my code that I never picked up on last week and I am feeling maybe 10% more confident than what I was a week ago. Testing is maybe becoming DARE I SAY IT somewhat understandable, I'm not at freak out stage anymore. I know I will always find TDD tough and at the end of the 16 weeks, I wont be like "YAY, test driven development is my favourite" exactly, but I will at least know where to begin.
Regarding Classes, I feel okay with them i'm not 100% but i'm not 100% on anything at the moment so i'll take that as a win! Any moment I don't want to cry is a big win in my eyes. I'm a crier (an ugly crier) when i'm stressed so I expect a lot of tears in next 16 weeks. Todays paired lab was great! I'd say the first lab I fully enjoyed although me and my lab partner managed to create an infinite loop... somehow... don't know how. I did really enjoy it and felt like I understood how to do tests on classes :) Week 2 Day 1 - SUCCESS
Day 2 - Multiple Classes
Really today was an extension of day 1 but playing with multiple classes. I feel like I know what i'm doing, but i don't know if I do... they did tell us on the first day about Imposter Syndrome so I'll assume thats what i'm suffering from. It was a tough class, making sure everything is linked and called correctly is quite tough although... testing does help this showing exactly where the errors are ect. It is really tough but I'm enjoying working with these kind of things. It's also relatively confusing. you can see below that from working with 1 class with two files then with 2 classes with 4 files can totally mess with your head.
lets make it more confusing by adding another class :) 3 classes 6 files all linked and can speak to each other. It is really cool. Although I find it hard, I feel like I understand it more. You make your classes small and simple and can build on top of that. The instructors have compared it to lego blocks, the lego block itself is really simple and basic but then you add detail and can make something rather spectacular by combining other lego blocks
Today for some reason I couldn't type ( that was my 5th attempt at writing 'couldn't' there) so I had tones of spelling errors which messed with my tests but at least I understood the errors which is more than I could last Thursday so EPIC WIN!
Diagrams - used to plan out your code before you even start coding. it helps write better code and makes it easier to understand as you have an idea about how they link before actually begin. 1 hour of planning can save you 4 hours of coding. I think this will help me generally due to the fact I struggle to know where to begin, so visualising it would take that confusion out of it.
Lab was great again today, I still have the Imposter Syndrome but talking your ideas through with someone is a really great way to bounce ideas off of each other.
Homework - Bear Fish River
Homework was.... interesting... Drawing diagrams did help link everything up and give me a starting point but right now I'm struggling to pull information from it, I'm not too worried though. As the homework gets more challenging, I do feel like I know what I am doing. I aimed to get the homework completed then maybe have a look at the extensions but I managed to complete the extensions other than 1 question so successful day overall.
Day 3 - Pry/ Lab
Pry is great for finding bugs, honestly I just need more time to mess around with it so ill update on this next week when i've had a chance to actually try it...
Paired Lab
Todays lab was really great. We had the option to work with either a pub or a snowman game. First we decided to go with the pub just to reconfirm what we had been doing in the homework and to be honest, I need all the practice I can get. We were also asked to make a commit after every passing test which also gave me practice pushing stuff to git and updating which again, is also need all the practice I can get. As I am feeling quite good today I'm going to say TESTING WENT GREAT! (take that last week me)
generally I do feel like I am picking things up slowly... but surely. I really do doubt myself with this but I'm going to continue going with the flow and trust the process!
Day 4 - Enumerables Exercism and Inheritance
Quite honestly, I think Thursdays are the day that I hate all things... hated Enumerables... hated lab hated inheritance .... hated them all. Even though I managed to get all the test passing and found the extensions easier than the actual MVP( ... no idea... don't ask, frankly I don't know ) I hated doing it. I was frustrated and annoyed and actually quite upset. I was feeling a bit under the weather today so felt crap before I even began so that obviously didn't help. "I do not know how to write code", "What am I doing here" are 2 of the many things going through my head. I think I'm just on a 1 week lag ... I'll probably be fine next week... well I hope I am...
Weekend Homework -
Weekend homework went fine... I don't really have much else to say... It never went terribly... it never went amazing... It was fun/challenging... there was some bits I was stuck on for a while.. Ive completed the MVP and the extension and just started the advanced extensions, so since it's weekend homework and its only Friday, after a well deserved sleep I'll attempt them. Below is where i've stopped as i'm actually a bit stuck but my brain is mush and I know there just isn't the ability to code for much longer so heres to a long nights sleep after a hard week!
Generally this week has been really positive (minus Thursday). I feel like I am getting a deeper understanding of what I am supposed to know but with Imposter Syndrome and general overwhelming feeling of self doubt, I feel like I shouldn't know what I do? It's quite a horrible feeling and I don't quite know how to explain it. I do still feel like I am the only one not really getting things at the moment but in all honesty but this weeks round off is much happier than last weeks so success!! but with the higher the high, the lower the low... ... but you know what they say...
"If it's worth it, it won't be easy. If it's easy it won't be worth it"
(cringe positive quote to keep you all going till next week!)
Top Tip - being someone who kind of beats myself up after a hard day, I've found watching TedX speeches really good/helpful and uplifting... theres too many to recommend as I find them all great, but most recently, "How To Get Better At The Things You Care About" by Eduardo Briceno at TEDxManhattanBeach. Title is also rather fitting.