Week Five: Day Three
I've been remiss in writing about the course — in my defense, trivial things like sleep and writing have taken a bit of a backseat to coding, but I feel like when I look back on this time in 10 years, I'll miss those eight days of class I didn't chronicle. When I went on my Everest Base Camp trek, I swore I would document every day. I didn't and tried to catch up on successive days, but even waiting 48 hours led to my memory being hazy and events bleeding together.
I had a bit of a subtle breakthrough moment today where I thought, "Okay, I think I just may be able to grasp this material". One of our TAs, D, got sidelined last week by a pretty serious car accident. Replacing him was a previous instructor, M, whom I got the chance to meet today. I actually saw him talk either last week or the week before at the Lightning Talk hosted at Bitmaker and I was really impressed at how he was able to convey complex ideas in a really easy-to-understand manner. Turns out he's able to translate that to an even simpler level with us web dev students, and I got awesome insights to things I'd been previously struggling with.
M sat down with me twice to help explain concepts, and I feel like the gap between theoretical and practical knowledge shrank a great deal today. One of the biggest things I've been struggling with the entire course was not knowing why I was doing what I was doing — it's one thing to copy-and-code, and quite another to be able to explain what I'm typing. I'm still nowhere near where I want to be, but I'm at least sorta kinda able to understand the bigger picture and how to triage problems.
And when all else fails, I just write down the material as fast as I can and try to make sense of it later on.
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