After Assingment 1
29 Mar 2021When I enrolled in this course, my husband (who is in IT) told me- “Why do you do that to yourself? Why do you wanna suffer? You will just be pissed off all the time, and blame me for everything.” Boy, was he right. This work is making me doubt that I have a functional brain. I feel syntactically crippled and challenged to solve a very simple task, even if it was shown to us at the Lab. It is super frustrating and I feel there is very little, if any, progress in programming for me.
So, my programming skills have not greatly improved at all, as I feel like I need more practice with syntax to be able to express myself through the algorithm. So this is what I have to improve. Also, I don’t think I have understood functions well, and this is an area of improvement for me. Another thing I should improve is to learn to test things before doing too much.
I spent the whole spring break trying to figure out different WODs and Labs and it just takes a whole lot of time but wasn’t able to do them without the screencast. Sometimes, it took me 5 tries to do a WOD.
I have troubles following Labs, so at some point, I have to stop looking for a bug and just wait for the screencast and do it myself. I enjoyed doing the HTML part of Assignment 1, because it is soooo easy when comparing to the programming part. I wanted to implement some things I didn’t know how, and when I try too much in the late evenings, and after that, I can’t fall asleep because my brain is too tense. And once I fall asleep, I dream about variables and solutions. Staying after class and corresponding with the professor has helped me a lot to understand things. I think we might need more workshops to get better at it. I feel like the material from labs is great, but it gets buried in the past and the long videos, so if we have some reference script with examples of code might be helpful. I do have it in my drive, but I never visit it.My suggestion - please don’t change Labs after we start working on them! And give us the reading for the lab immediately before doing it, not 2 classes ahead, because what you read and hear you need to start practicing immediately, otherwise it gets overwritten with much other information we ingest during our days. Also, I am very dissapointed we didn’t have a workshop on debugging, as I think this is a crucial skill and it should be shown to us how to do it, not only read about it. I whould be great if that is thought before Assigment 1, to save us from all the unecesary pain.
This class is a big lesson for me. First of all, it showed me how old I am. If you wanna be a programmer, you have to spend all days and nights immersed in it. But I have to do laundry, play with the child, feed the family, and all of that adult stuff (not to mention work and research), so that train has passed. Secondly, it has thought me that I am super arrogant and impatient because I wanna give up too often when I can’t solve a simple problem. Finally, it has thought me how web apps work, so I won’t feel as much as a fraud when I teach the topic to my students at LIS.
