Phew! My brain has been hurting (in a good way) for the first time in years. Looking back over the last 7 days, I’d say I spent at least 14 hours a day dealing with code. The best metaphor I can think of is that part in the Matrix when they plug Keanu Reeves in so he can learn things quickly. That’s what it feels like.
Not to imply that it’s been all easy-going exactly. At any point this past week when I thought I was “getting it” seemingly minutes later I’d get hit with a new lab or concept in lecture that, as one student put it, knocked me on my ass. Thursday’s Ruby labs and this weekend’s homework were especially challenging— iterating through nested hashes is NOT fun. And I’m sure next week will only move faster, but I’m glad I’m learning to cope with the inevitable setbacks frustrations of THE STRUGGLE earlier rather than later. Doing 10 push-ups or walking to get a sandwich does wonders.
I did make some progress on my first outside-of-class project, ink. I was able to separate the bulk of the code out to a shell file, allowing me to easily track it with Git. So I went ahead and pushed the repository to GitHub. Plenty of code to refactor and features to add, if you’re so inclined!