Week Four: Day 2
A much better day today. At several sporadic moments, I had tiny little lightbulbs of understanding going off in my head and moments where I actually felt proud of my effort, which has been pretty rare so far. Actually, it's been pretty rare in my life, that feeling of being truly proud of my efforts, but I've managed to scrape together one or two of them in this course so far and shades of it popped up today.
We had this one assignment called "Rainforest", which was to build a cheap version of Amazon (get it? Rainforest? Amazon? har har). I spent several hours on it yesterday, finished it, and uploaded my GitHub repo — and thought I'd put that baby to bed. I had several errors when I opened my Rails server, but wasn't too fussed by it because I'd been trying to take to heart what my instructors said about just working through the assignments without getting too obsessed about any one step. I just figured I'd get that puppy done and deal with the finer points the next day, which is what I did.
Except those "few" finer points turned out to be almost 45 minutes with one of the TAs where I learned that not only did I have several crucial files empty (there was another hour+ spent in filling them out!), but I had the stupidest small errors scattered about. An equal sign where it shouldn't have been, a plural that should have been a single, writing "text_field" instead of "password_field" — all these things that I'm not (yet) versed in enough to be able to spot on my own. And any smugness I was feeling at relatively zipping through the assignment was quickly erased when I had to fill in the missing files in the Views folder; when I called over the TA to help me out with stuff the second time around, my voice was quiet and monotonic and I was resigned to saying, "I have no idea why I wrote that" when she asked me questions. I had also inadvertently double-coded in a few folders, so I had to go back and delete that stuff, too.
But the lightbulb-ish moments!
There was a sort-of breakout session near the end of the day, a time at which I was hoping to take off. But because F was leading it and he's totally awesome in his delivery and breakdown of the material, I sat at my chair, backpack on back, completely engrossed in the material. He was asking us questions about what to put where and which step to go to next — and you know what? I knew the answers to more than 90% of them! I was trying not to dominate the breakout, but not many other people seemed to be volunteering answers and the ones I was were almost entirely right, so I figured, "hey, why not?" Man, I can't tell you what an awesome feeling it was to not feel like a total dunce for once and feel like maybe, just maybe, I haven't wasted the last three-ish weeks and a lot of money and that this might just turn out to be okay.
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