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.
Day 38 – Birthday Weekend!
Today I am in another city to celebrate my dad’s birthday, so I’m not going to write much today. I’m going to try to squeeze at least an hour of coding in because he’s in OK right now and I need to pass the time. Anyway, I’ll do my best to code at least, but if not, it’ll just be youtube videos for me.
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…
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!
Days 33/34 – Made a Video!
I made my first YouTube video!! Yay!! I felt like a fool the whole time- was suuuuper nervous, but that’s exactly why I felt I had to do it. I need to get over my fears of public speaking and force myself to look at myself from another person’s perspective. I want to get rid of bad habits and gain more confidence in myself. Aside from that, I’ve been working on ruby problems as usual and found myself having to read the variable mutability article (again) for the thousandth time. Tomorrow I will start the Hard 1 Problems. It’s starting to make more sense, but I feel like some days are a hit and miss for me. Outside of all of that, the Code for Bryan/College Station group has its first Hack and Hang next Wednesday and I’m nervous but really curious as to where this will all go. Since there hasn’t been much participation before this, I wonder if this group will even survive the year. We’ll see.
Day 32 – Setting Up
Vin bought me a shiny new HP laptop, so for the past two days I’ve been setting it up. I wanted to use something besides AWS Cloud9 and settled on Visual Studio Code. It comes with a terminal and text editor and you can push/pull code to and from Github. It’s also quite beautiful to look at. This is a windows laptop, so I’ve had to work around that a bit but it’s alright, I learn that way. Also, having a backlit keyboard at this point in my studies is a MUST. Anyway, I’ve had a few ideas for videos that I would like to try out. I thought it would be useful for me to explain things like Git/Github, PEDAC, Cloud9, and any other thing I’ve learned so far at Launch School. Hopefully it’s beneficial to someone else, because god knows that trying to figure it all out on your own is freaking nails. I’ve never made a video for the public in my life so surely that’ll be a fun experience. I don’t even know how to go about editing, so lots of research is ahead of me. Also, it’s probably not a good idea to spend too much time on this, so I’m thinking just doing a quick 5 minute intro, and then figure out the Git one after that, maybe 10 minutes. I want it so that you can see the editor and all the work that I do during it, so that the viewer isn’t looking at me just rambling about it. I’ll have to figure that out. Anyways…This week I hope to study 35 hours. My eventual goal is 40 hours. Goodnight, be back tomorrow.
Felicia Bacon 