Day: July 18, 2019

Day 37 – First Study Session

Today I held my first study with Megan, a fellow student of mine at Launch School. I was super nervous, as I’ve never had a one on one study session with anyone before. Turns out, Megan is totally cool and was also a newbie at all of this, so yay! I’m not alone! We had technical troubles with trying to share the screen to show our editors though, so that was kind of annoying, but we worked around it. What we did today was this: I showed on my screen a specific problem that I had trouble with during my studies, and walked through it using PEDAC. (I explained what the PEDAC process was in a previous post.) Then she gave me feedback on what didn’t make sense to her, what she liked about the code, etc. Then we switched and she chose the problem to which I gave her my feedback. It was my first time speaking to a complete stranger about my code, and it wasn’t that I was embarrassed at what I had written, it was more of that I didn’t even really know how to ‘speak code’. If that makes sense? It’s one thing saying the code in your head, but another thing to try to articulate to someone else what you did, clear enough so that they understand it. Thankfully she was kind enough to help me on things that weren’t clear, and surprisingly enough to me, I was able to help her too! She said that I had wrote out my thought processes so well and did my best to understand the problem, and was inspired by me! That made me feel sooo good! She’s much further ahead in the course than I am but I’m really glad she took the time to do this with me. I think I learned a lot from her today, and so we decided next week to do it again! Hopefully I solved the issue of the shared screen thing by then…

She helped me to understand that some of the code I had written was unnecessary.

Also made another video this morning, but it came out to be over 20 minutes, which is mind blowing to me. I wanted to cry in front of the camera last time I did it and then for this one I couldn’t shut up! It must be progress 🙂 I’ll either edit this one and put it up Monday or I’ll create a shorter one, that talks specifically about the things that I’m doing to be organized for school.

Day 36 – Bullet Journal

So creativity bit me in the butt last night, thus I have decided to start journaling. Is that a word? I keep seeing the red squiggle under it, but I swore it was? Anyways, I dug through my things and found an empty book with blank paper!! Turns out, I also had an unused pack of colored pencil, and a new pack of pens. Everything I needed was thrown about in my junk box in my study. To start it off, I wrote a note to myself explaining why I decided to do it, and then on the next page wrote out a list of long term and short term goals (in no particular order). Using Github for the past month and looking at its heat map to let me knows the days that I’ve coded has inspired me to create my own heat map! It basically outlines the activities that I happen to do in a day. More specifically, daily or weekly goals that I would love to meet. A few are: study 4 hours- with red, had fun- green (the first thing that came to mind was playing Dark Souls), and rowed at least 2,000 meters- yellow. It’s cute, and I think for every month I’ll try to come up with a different way to represent the data that I collect. This lets me see what I actually do in a day, without me having to write it all out in boring words in my planner. Also, it’s fun! When I accomplish something, say, writing this post for example, I get to color in the box with the color that corresponds to that activity. In this case, it’s navy blue! It’s like I’m saying to myself, YAY! you did something! What an awesome feeling. I’m really trying to see what I’m most consistent with, and what I should be doing more. Following my heat map, I have the days themselves. These are seperated two a page, and this is basic bullet points of what I have planned for the day. These could be anything from ‘clean the cat litter’, to ‘finish Hard 1 problems’. I draw a little check mark next to the ones that I did do, and see if I can push the things I didn’t do for the next day. That’s as far as I got today, but I plan to create a page for each month- a month overview of sorts, and a page for YouTube video ideas! My creative side has been shelved for a long time now so it’s about time I exercise it. I’ve also noticed that there’s been too much on my mind lately, stress and ideas and whatnot, and it’s disconnecting me from my present state. That bothers me; I want to free my mind of so much noise and just color it all on paper. That’s it for tonight! Oh by the way, I did finish Lesson 3 today, and I’m starting a whole new set of exercises tomorrow. For real this time! Goodnight!