Month: July 2019

Day 46 – New Video, and New Month for My Journal!

I love when a new month starts, it’s so exciting. I know I could start anything at any time, but it’s just something about starting a project or goal, or whatever it is at the beginning of a new month. Like a breath of fresh air. For my bullet journal, I created a couple new pages for August which include an ‘at a glance’ calendar, color map for my daily activities and a goals/bills page. I plan to put in more pages for the days specifically to cover any other thing I do in the day that isn’t already in my color map. Overall the design is much neater but I would like to buy better pens and markers later on. I’m thinking I’ll stick to what I have for a few months and if I keep it up, it’ll be a little treat to myself to buy all those nice things!

For my channel, I finally found a software that’ll record your screen. This is perfect for what I wanted to do! Now I can work through ruby problems and not mess around with my phone. That’s another story. The video camera on that thing is utter garbage. It’s so grainy and the video camera zooms in so close to my face and I can’t figure out how to switch it to the front camera to record anything in front of me!! Soooo annoying. Until I get a better one, it’ll have to do. Maybe for Black Friday I’ll do some shopping for a new camera also! Tomorrow I’m planning to meet with another student who is further along in her LS studies, Melissa, who will help me try to wrap my head around basic ruby loops. My video today showed me working through a problem, one that I have found to be troublesome for me before and STILL is now! I need to figure out some other way to solve it because it’s just not sticking in my head.

A few goals for this month: spend 15 minutes every day learning German, spend 30 hours a week studying, row for 5 days a week, learn to bake a cake and frost it. I have so much more but for brevity I won’t list them all. Organization and time management are two areas that I’m seriously lacking in, so I’m actually surprised that I managed to keep up with for the past couple weeks, for the most part. P.S don’t make fun of my lettering/ drawing, It’s not that good but it’s okay! I deal.

Color Map Legend and Study Hour Graph

Day 44 – More Ruby

Today I managed a little more than 3 hours doing ruby problems! I was battling a migraine literally the ENTIRE time but I managed to almost finish the Easy set!! Yay me. Tomorrow I will aim to get in about 5 hours, maybe 6. The NEW goal for my study weeks it to get about 30 hours, so 5 hours a day for 6 days should be sufficient. I want at least one day where I either journal, or rest or do anything but code. My mind needs the rest and I know now that if it doesn’t get that, I’m screwed. I literally will not function. Today I made dinner! Bean and cheese tacos with bacon and avocado, and cookies! God I miss having an oven. Baking is something that I’ve been wanting to get into for a really long time, and very soon that might actually happen. Tonight I made a cookies from one of those premade package thingies from Pillsbury and it was heavenlllllyyyyy. That is the roundest, most perfectest cookie I’ve ever made and I’m so proud :’). Anyway I’m now in bed with Vin watching dumb dark souls 3 videos and laughing my arse off. With that, Goodnight my little world!

Anniversary!

Yesterday made one year for Vin and I! It’s been a wild ride and I could have never guessed that we would be in this new city and I’d be a full time student. Crazy how much a year can make a difference! Now hopefully next year this time I’ll be a developer! That’s what I would love to be before I hit the age of 27. Anyway, he took me to two nice places! A waffle house with killer chicken and waffles and french toasts, and then a world grille restaurant. He bought me flowers and a fitbit watch! What a guy. Soo lucky to have him. We planned to go lazer tag but we were run over by a herd of small children literally at the door. How annoying. I was pissed, it ruined my mood and we didn’t have time to do anything else but it was okay. The next thing I would like us to do is ice skating! Now it’s back to the grind for the both of us!

Day 42/43 – Time to Get Back In

As my little world knows, I’ve had to take a break the past week for mental health reasons. Looking back now, only after a few days, I wonder what the heck was wrong with me. I’m not too sure, but it felt ‘crippling’. I won’t go into details but I’m feeling better now. I just need to pace myself. And with that, I did about 30 minutes yesterday before a migraine set in, so coding was pretty much done after that. Today I managed about an hour or a little more working on a Ruby problem that asks a user for a positive integer, then asks if they want to compute either the sum or the product of all the numbers between 1 and that number that they entered. I managed to solve it with a case statement, but wasn’t too happy with it. Looking at other people’s solutions, instead of feeling worried thinking that theirs looked better than mine, I tried to think: ‘What are they doing that is working, that I could implement in my solution?’ It helps to see plenty of unique solutions and be able to pick out the ones that I think are most readable. Knowing this, I’m able to tell myself that ultimately I’ll be able to write better code because I’ve seen so many ways to do one thing. I’ll do one more problem tonight and start back to do about 6 hours tomorrow.

Day 41 – Lesson 4

A few days ago I had finished Lesson 3 for Launch School but didn’t immediately go to Lesson 4. That’s what yesterday was for! There are 12 assignments, including a summary and a quiz at the end. I’ve reached the 4th assignment, which goes over in greater detail the PEDAC process. I’ve been wanting something like this for a while because I was starting to think that maybe I wasn’t fully understanding parts of it when trying to solve a problem. It’s like they knew I needed more practice! I was mostly getting tripped up on the ‘Rules’ and ‘Data Structure’ parts. Maybe it’s the ‘Two-Layer’ problem that I’m dealing with, but I’m trying my hardest to practice simple ruby problems and learn all that there is to know. I noticed that loops are a tad bit fuzzy, accessing elements and keys in hashes and arrays, and the difference between assigning elements and accessing them. Tonight there is the first Hack and Hang for CFBCS so I’m heading there soon, to see what it’s about. Tomorrow I will finish notes for PEDAC.

Day 39 – Taking a Mental Health Break

As I mentioned in the last post, I was out of town for my pop’s birthday and it was wonderful to see all of my family. Being so far from everyone makes it a little hard for me, but I couldn’t miss this birthday. Now this isn’t going to be too long of a post, and this is why: I’m tired. Burnout is real, and it’s ugly. The past two weeks have made me feel like an emotional wreck! Normally it wouldn’t be much of a problem if it was like a movie I was watching that had a sad scene in it that make me shed a few tears or reading something inspirational online…this ‘thing’ had me crying every. single. day. For anything. It just seemed like any little thing could push me over the edge and I had it when I left. So far I had made it to almost 40 days straight of coding. Breaking that streak wasn’t something I was going to let happen, but I did let it happen. I needed to. Sometimes you just need a break and my brain was literally telling me that I need to step away from the screens and take a break. Mental health is no joke. I could barely sleep the past couple weeks because I’d be freaking out about nonsense really: not doing well in school, worrying about my family, all the crazy ideas that I have for my life. I thought journaling would help me to get it down on paper and out of my mind, and it does help, but I need to do other things to. I think I’m pushing myself too hard when it comes to school and I need to stop because whenever I don’t meet a goal or accomplish anything it makes me feel like a failure, and that’s not healthy. *Note to self*: take it easy. A little bit every day will get you further then trying to do too much and burning out. I will take another day to relax then really jump into it again. Even today, I could only manage two hours before the migraine came in. Anyway, that’s it for today. Also, i’m rethinking whether or not writing posts everyday is ideal for me, so I’ll either stick with it or go with writing one every other day.