My Third Day
Today was a frustrating day, but in a good way (I think). Learning code and web dev is like being in the bright sunny outdoors...and then shoved into a pitch black room. I'm told to grope around and identify objects based on touch, but I'm given no clues as to what they are, their relationship to each other, or how they work in the real world. I'm not allowed to use a candle or flashlight; all I have is my hands and brain.
And every time I ponder over a corner or side and wonder what I'm feeling, I hear a voice in the darkness saying, "I know what this is, and this is what it does!" I spend hours patting objects and trying to visualize them in my head, comparing them to taxonomies in my head, but I feel like I'm coming up short on 99% of them.
When I was in elementary school, one of the biggest video games was Zelda: Ocarina of Time. There were two ways you could play it: organically and taking everything as it came, or by figuring out — whether by guidebook or by talking to others — what the best strategies were in beating each level. I'm using a bit of both, but with the latter, I apply those techniques and move on, but have little idea why it's working.
We had one assignment in class yesterday that was a variation on Fizz Buzz. I swore I wouldn't copy and paste the answer, so I spent hours googling what others had done with it. Even though I didn't fully understand the methods and commands I had to input, I arrived at a solution that was really elegant and impressive. But my goal isn't simply to write elegant code, it's to understand why doing it a certain way makes it elegant, and being able to repeat it consistently.
But for now — and especially after going to bed around 2am last night — it's going to be a relatively early night for me.
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