Sometime last year I bought Chris Pine’s Learn to Program book. I read a little bit of it, then put it down. I was still so new to Ruby then, and all the problems seemed extra difficult. Once in a while I’ll take a look at it, but it’s a little bit hard for me to code from a book, when I could go online and find hundreds of exercises to practice with. There was one problem in particular that stuck with me, called 99 Bottles of Beer. The exercise said to write code that would print the lyrics of that song. I had to look them up because I wasn’t familiar with them. Now, last year I looked at that problem and thought “I can’t solve it. I don’t know enough yet”. For whatever dumb reason I never attempted it after that, but still thought of that problem from time to time. A year later, on this day, I solved it. It happened in the shower, where all of my best ideas come from. It just suddenly came to me! People talk about this exact sort of thing: sometimes you can’t figure out a problem while sitting in front of it for hours, racking your brain for a solution. Apparently your brain is constantly working, even in the background, figuring things out. Sometimes I couldn’t sleep at night for this reason; my mind was constantly racing thinking about ways to solve my problems. I’ve since learned to stop that, so as to not exhaust myself. Today was different. I woke up late, and was bored of what I was doing and needed a break, so I went to do something that always makes me feel 100%. It just hit me so quick when the problem popped up in my mind: I could set a counter to start at 99, then enter a loop that will print out the appropriate lyrics for the song, while subtracting 1 to account for the number of bottles after the initial amount. I will decrement the counter by 1 until I reach 0, at which point I exit the loop and that’s it. That’s literally all it is. I’m sure there are a million ways to do it, but for me, this is easiest for me understand. I can glance at it, and understand what is happening at each step. It just flows, at least for me. I’m proud of myself for FINALLY solving it. It really gave me that boost that I needed today. I am learning.
Day 76 – Everyday I’m Strugglin’
It’s an uphill battle for me trying to learn ruby everyday. It’s incredibly frustrating when I don’t think that I’m making any progress and all I see are error messages for 5 hours. Rarely do I get a problem without having to look at the solution. Maybe my next go around will be better. I’m trying not to get too down about it all and just focus on growth and the path to mastery. I ‘kinda finished’ Easy 7 today but I’ll have to go over all of them again tomorrow. The last problem was fun, only because it was easy. That’s the problem in the picture. I even did the further exploration to be the best of my knowledge and ability, which is enough for me. Everyday I strive to improve myself from the day before, and I must be learning something because I can solve at least 1 problem in a set. I won’t tell anyone that because it’s embarrassing and disappointing, but hey, small victories. I did manage to start my Array Anki cards so hopefully that’ll help me to become more familiar with those methods.
Also, last night I made a half-double crochet square for the first time! It’s not the best, but it’s okay! I hope to learn how to make a beanie soon. Anyways, that’s it for tonight. Goodnight!
Day 75 – Finishing Easy 6
It always feels good when I ‘finish’ a section of problems. ‘Finish’ is in quotes because at this point, nothing is ever really finished. I have to redo all these problems again over and over until I understand them. Besides attempting them on my own and if I get really stuck, looking at the solution, I look at other people’s code to see what other ways are available to solve that problem. Ruby is great in the fact that it’s flexible and possible to come to a solution for a problem in many ways. I don’t ever feel bad when my solution doesn’t look as good as someone else’s; it made sense to me when I wrote it and that’s all that counts. I’m still a newbie at this stage so I’ll take any working solution at the moment; I’ll refactor later. The problem in the picture was fun! I like working with arrays and strings. I thought it would be too complex for me but my first attempt ended up working. I wrote out the LS solution and another one that I found to be open-minded to other ways of doing the same thing.
I almost met my goal of 6 hours. After 5 hours, my brain tends wants to shut down and I won’t fight it. After Ruby, I do my minimum of German practice then I do something fun, like crochet or Dark Souls. I stopped doing that stuff in the middle of my study session so that I may push myself harder to keep on with the Ruby and reward myself with playtime later. It works! The rest of the week will be pretty much the same: working on Ruby exercises until I’m blue in the face.
Day 74 – Rest Day
Mondays are usually the hardest days for me in terms of studying. I am learning not to stress myself out if i’m not able to get it done. Instead, I give myself a day off, but if I choose to spend an hour or less studying, I will do that, but it’s not mandatory. That way, I don’t get sick of seeing Ruby all week long, and I’m able to do other things that I enjoy. I picked up crocheting again, and it always surprises me how easy it is. You can pretty much learn anything on Youtube, and it’s easiest I think to learn how to do something like this that way. It’s free too, which is awesome. I play the video on half-speed, and pause when I need to. Right now I’m learning to how crochet a half double piece. The only thing that messes me up is keeping track of how many stitches I have but I can count them at the end. Other than that, it’s very relaxing to do, and I feel accomplished because I’m making something! I always have that urge to make things. It can be anything from cakes, to little crochet pieces, to paintings. It keeps the demons away 🙂
Tomorrow is when the hard works gets done. My goal is 6 hours, broken up using the pomodoro technique. On days that I feel more tired, I tend to do 30 minutes of work, 10 minutes of rest for the entirety of the study session. Otherwise, I’m able to do about a 45 minutes to an hour and then take a little longer break. Around the 2 or 3 hours mark is when I stop for lunch and doing something fun like play video games, after which I start again for the remainder of the 3 hours. If I get 6 hours a day everyday until Saturday, I’ll hit my weekly goal of 30 hours. I really want to start preparing for the assessment by the end of September so that I may take it sometime in October. I don’t want to rush it, that would be detrimental as I’d risk failing, but I don’t want to stagnant either when I put in the hard work now and progress steadily, but surely.
Anyways, that’s it for tonight. I’m going to learn that half-double stitch, then call it a night.
P.S. Hurricane Dorian has been monstrous in the Caribbean these past few days. It hit St. Croix, where my mom lives, as a Category 1 storm and it’s amazing how fast those things pick up speed. I saw so many videos of people trapped in their homes and cars, and even attics watching the waters flooding in on them. I know it’s even more terrifying at night. That must be scary. I’m grateful to be here in my bed and I wish there was something I could do. Goodnight.
Day 73 – Fun Day
For a Saturday, I’ve managed to get a good amount of things done! Vin took me to one of my favorite coffee shops and we both got 2 hours of studying done; him Spanish and Ruby for me. I was struggling with the first problem right off the bat and he told me to research online how to do the ‘math’ for it, and it saved me. I did figure the math part out, maybe not in the most elegant way but I’m happy with the first attempt. I realized that I need to learn more about formatting strings so that is something to work on before the assessment. The problem itself is interesting, you have to convert a degree as an integer, to a string that shows the degree, minutes and seconds, with their symbols. The little circle that denotes a degree is hard for me to format for whatever reason. I even ran other people’s code in my terminal to see what it outputted, but it showed the same thing, a bunch of slashes and something that looks like gibberish. I will have to seek help in the school channel on what to do, but otherwise I sufficiently arrived at a working solution. After that we came home to rest and then went out again to but tea; I love my loose leaf English Breakfast! I also rowed today, and went grocery shopping because I decided on a whim to cook stew chicken, one of my favorite meals!
On a side note, my heart has this thing where it starts beating extremely fast and I’m not able to breathe properly. It gets to the point where I feel like I’m about to pass out, but Vin taught me something that slows down my heart rate and calms my breathing. It’s pretty scary but I’m trying not to worry too much about it.
Anyways, tomorrow is meant to be my rest day. I really do intend to relax, but I might end up studying for a bit because why not. It can only help me. I started my new month in my bullet journal but it’s not colored, so once that is done then I’ll take pictures of it. It’s going to be September, my month!! I hope to keep the momentum going in terms of keeping up with my personal goals, and using this journal has absolutely been a game changer. It keeps me accountable and it helps me to visual see what I need to do as opposed to having a boring basic checklist. Plus it’s fun to color, so that in itself is an activity.
Day 72 – Easy 5, Done.
I have managed to finally ‘finish’ the Easy 5 problems. By ‘finish’ I mean I will definitely have to redo them all like 5 times, again. They were actually fun though. I’m tired today so tomorrow I will write more on what I’m doing/planning to do. Just quickly though, I lost my first place spot in Duolingo so I’m trying to get it back before morning! I realized yesterday that they have a Latin course but it’s in beta.
Let’s see, I can’t think of anything else to write because I’m so out of it so gute nacht!
Day 71 – Finally, I Passed a Quiz.
I think technically, 70 and above is a passing score for any quiz, but I never thought of it as passing. An 80% or higher is passing, and that’s what I finally accomplished today. I will say this though, if I had stuck with my original answers on two of those questions that I missed, I would have made a 100%. Thinking about that makes me want to cry, but I’ve already shed enough tears for today. Seriously, at the last question of the quiz, I had a tiny meltdown. I had to pause in the middle of taking it to eat and calm down. I told myself when I came back to it that no matter what score I get, it was going to be alright. I just accepted the fact that I just couldn’t figure it out. This morning I created a log post on my 100 Days of Code repository and rewrote it three times. The first couple times I had written in the ‘thoughts’ section about the fact that I was nervous and was worried that I wouldn’t passed. Then I scratched it all and wrote at last, I will pass with an 80% today. I think the universe sent it back to me. Looking at all of my previous quiz scores, there is obviously a slight increase in the overall score, so that must mean that I’m learning something, even as the lessons get more and more difficult. I thought it was just me having a hard time parsing through loads of code but it isn’t, apparently the quizzes give almost everyone a tough time. Anyway, I worked up a lot of my nerves the past week preparing for this quiz and I guess it paid off. I’ve started writing anki cards for most-used methods so that’s what I’ll continue to do for today, just to let my mind rest a little bit. Tomorrow I will have to jump back into the Small Problems exercises. *cries inside* So those are even tougher than the ones in the actual lessons and make me feel like a dummy more than anything else I’ve encountered in 101. My goal was to take the assessment in September but that might be pushed to October. I’ve realized that I absolutely need that time to let this information sink in.
On a side note, I’ve noticed a changed in my body: I have more energy. That doesn’t mean that I’m not sleepy or wishing to sleep (because I am), but I’ve noticed that I’m able to endure…things. Before, I’d lay in bed all day and not want to leave for hours. I’d sleep in, not study that much, and physically feel like I had to drag myself to do literally anything. For the past week I’ve taken my iron and vitamin d vitamins and I suspect that has something to do with it. Oh! 5 days in a row, I’ve done my exercising on the row machine and took only one day off to rest, and resumed. Never in my short life have I had tone legs, but now that I’m forming them, I can’t imagine what they even felt like before! I feel so much stronger. It’s such a great thing feeling that I can hold myself up and do things for an entire day without losing the energy completely like what I’ve been feeling for years. Hopefully this lasts as long as I keep up with it.
Day 70 – Quiz Prep
I’ve been pretty consistent for the past week, studying every single day even if it’s 30 minutes. I reached 5 hours and 40 minutes today which is great! My maximum hours for a day is 6, and my minimum is 4, so anything in between there will make me happy. Tomororw I will take the quiz at the end of lesson 5 and even now just thinking about it just makes me super nervous. I tend to range in the 70s in terms of score, but I do plan on getting at least a B on this one. I have a feeling though that it’s going to be tough for me, lesson 5 really tripped me up. I thought sorting was going to be a breeze but it was totally the opposite. There’s so much more to it than you think! The lesson was shorter so at least it wasn’t too much information but the information that I did have is difficult to understand. Lesson 6 is the last one in the 101 course; after that, it’s just studying for the assessment. I’ve been told that the assessments are less tricky then the quizzes and I bloody hope so because if taking the quizzes has taught me anything, it’s that I’m just going to fail. Seriously, you have to get a 90 or better on the written and oral and if you fail you have to wait awhile before you take it. Ahhh I’m scared! Oh well, it’s gotta get done. Goodnight!
Day 62 – Lesson 5 and German
A few days ago I took my Lesson 4 quiz and like I said before, I made a 75, which isn’t wonderful but it’s progress from my last Quiz. Granted, it was only about 2 points higher but still, I’ll take it. Obviously my goal is at least and 80% so I’m moving through the lesson assignments at a snails pace. It’s getting to the point in the lessons where we have to take apart code snippets line by line, letter by letter. It’s easier now for me to look at the code and try to figure out what it will output and return, but it’s more difficult to articulate each line and letter. It even says it when you start the lesson: “Take your time, and go through it all carefully. The goal is to deeply understand it all, not finish the assignment as fast as possible.” Which is easier said than done, but I’m not messing around. Also I’m working on studying consistently throughout the week, at least 3 hours but no more than 6. If I want breaks, I take them without shame and then I get back to work and eliminate all distractions. It’s Wednesday and so far the past two days have been going okay. Despite physical pains and waking up so much lately than I want to, it still gets done. Working with nested collections and articulating problems is tricky, so it’s very important to understand it all.
Aside from Ruby, I’m learning German. It’s a beautiful and fun to learn language. A lot of the words look like English so it’s not as difficult to pick up then when I tried French. Now that Vin is doing it too by learning Spanish, I have some competition. That’s exactly what I need to keep going and stay on top of it.
Day 57 – Quiz, Easy 4 and The Range
This will be short because I’m too tired to really write anything. This week has been pretty busy for me: Monday was spent doing Driver’s Ed, and I aced the test! Tuesday morning I had to take the car into Goodyear to see if they could fix my evil a/c unit in my car that decides to go out on literally the hottest days of the year, days where the temperatures reach over 101 degrees. Turns out, all models from 2010-2015 are affected like this, and it’s something the dealership has to replace. Also my tire pressure light won’t turn off even though the tires are properly filled. What a waste of time. I did manage to do a minimum of 2 hours of that day and the next, even while I started to get sick. It’s weird, I had tooth pain that then resulted in ear pain on that same side, then I felt flu-ish. Despite all of that, I did about 5 and 1/2 hours today!! After about an hour or two of reviewing of Lesson 4, I took the quiz and that was a total of 3 hours. Good Lord my eyes were glazing towards the end, and I was disappointed with my final grade, however I did make tiny progress from my last grade. My second quiz score was a 73 and this one was a 75, so maybe it’s progress? Whatever, I’ll take it. To blow off (literally) some frustration, Vin took me to the shooting range, and despite still feeling a bit sick and tired, I got a better feel for how I’m doing in terms of groups and handling the firearm. My Bersa kicks back hard and it always startles me even when I brace for it. He bought a new .22 called the Firefly and it’s so nice to hold and it’s fun to shoot. It doesn’t really kick at all! It did jam a few times however and it could either be because it’s brand new and needs to break in, or because it’s on the cheaper side. August 25th is the next Concealed Handgun Class so we’re preparing for that as much as we can. Tomorrow I will do my best to log in 6 hours of study time, 4 working on Easy 4 problems and 2 reviewing quizzes or Lesson 5. Easy 4 has been a nightmare for me and I’ve been dreading doing those problems but alas, I cannot shy away from them anymore. I’m reaching the end of 101 (2 lessons away) so fearful of the problems or not, they’ve got to get done. I don’t really know why problems that deal with numbers and mathematical operations are hard for me. That’s it for now, this turned out longer than I thought it would have. Goodnight world!
Felicia Bacon 