apPizza academy

Until I feel like I can take a breather, I will keep these short. Which may be never.

Today, we did jQuery on top of CSS. jQuery handled a lot of different aspects of CSS for us, and we got to build Tic Tac Toe and Towers of Hanoi. My partner and I seemed to get along well, and I think we were on similar levels in terms of what we wanted to do with the project, how much creative energy we were willing to extend, and just switching off pairs.

Leen helped me fix the currying specs on my SHSL Practice Assessment! They weren't working after all, but she helped me figure out what was wrong with it.

I also learned we have THREE more assessments, not two. Another reason to take less breathers and make sure I get through all this.

However, I do feel like I'm enjoying the creative aspects/precise tweaking a lot, since I am art inspired. I wonder if that means I prefer front end to back end?

Tomorrow we do aJAX Twitter.

This one is going to be short due to how late I went to bed.

We did CSSFriends yesterday. It was a good practice in CSS/HTML, and tweaking elements in the Chrome browser. I had fun with tweaking, since I've spent many years doing pixel perfect image manipulation.

I got ahead on the jQuery readings we had so I would have more time in the evening to do things.

In this case, the evening was dedicated to creating a Super Duper High School Level Practice Assessment, Javascript with jasmine specs to match. That took way too long. I didn't think I would be up till 2 in the morning, figuring out why I couldn't get recursion calls to take, or how to get the currying specs to pass.

In the end, I got the latter to work, but not the former. :(

Now I'm really really tired. I'll get ahead again on readings today and try to go to bed early for once.

Due to the incident at App Academy, as well as me calling in sick Friday, we will start with Week 6 Day 1 instead!

Today we did more Javascript exercises. We practiced using arguments, particularly in myBind and currying, and we also practiced using a Surrogate to do inheritance. My partner was willing to take it slow and ensure I understood myBind very well before we moved on to currying, which I picked up on a little quicker. We just got started on almost being able to render for Asteroids, but fell short of time. After class, my partner went forward in getting it to work, while I paired with another person who I said I'd try pairing with to study for the assessment. We went over myBind again and I think it helped both of us reinforce its purpose/usefulness.

Tomorrow we have a CSS day. I'm not sure how that will go, but it'll be a nice break from Javascript.

Other than that, I don't know what else to say for now. I had a lot of saltine crackers throughout the day?

We had to do problems we did the first week of App Academy, but in Javascript today. I had a patient partner who was willing to take it easy and explain things to me, since he'd gotten a bit ahead on the material, so that was really nice.

It was a tough day in terms of material though. I'm not used to Javascript yet, and at one point, all the parenthesises, semi-colons, and brackets sort of merged together into a big blur.

Javascript feels like it's going to be tougher to transition into. The material given for it feels pretty bare-bones, and I don't feel like it'll have some of the enjoyability I had when working on 99Cats and the Reddit clone, where I felt like I had enough to contribute so I could feel less like the weaker pair for once. But we'll see how it goes.

So for now, I don't have very much to say about it, but I do plan on studying over the weekend a lot and taking advantage of not having to worry about the next assessment for a while.

I woke up at 5 AM today to do the practice assessment at least one more time before the actual assessment. I finally managed to get it under just two hours. Feeling doomed, I went in and used my hour of study hall to do the assessment one more. I managed to have 12 specs failing by the time the real assessment started, and I figured that wasn't too bad. It meant if I did well enough, I could probably have enough time to spare to wittle it down if circumstances were really bad.

In the end... I passed completely! With extra time to spare! I basically had it all down in about 70 minutes, and the 30 minutes or so was just debugging a couple of persistent errors by using launchy's save_and_open_page feature, debugger, and staying calm remembering a few wise words from a person from the previous cohort.

Definitely for me, having someone go over the potential debugging tools I have and using them first-hand really helps reinforce for me that I should use it, and that often leads to me using it way more. I like to think once I know and see how to debug, debugging is one of my stronger points. One of my weaker points is probably absorbing material quick and churning it out.

Regardless, this assessment went really well for me, and once I fixed that one bug preventing my last 5 specs from passing, I was sure it had to be a mistake - so I screenshoted my result alongside the assessment timer page, and went to talk to Daniel, but it turns out he had already graded my test and he confirmed it all passed. Yay! That put me in a very good mood today for the first time in...... hmm. A long time actually. :|

The rest of the day was a chance to catch up on material and also start on Javascript. I think this is going to be a tough one... I've been struggling through the material, and even wrote a simple program that'll convert input from the Ruby method into Javascript's equivalents, as well as it also giving you some helpful tips on certain Javascript methods. We'll see how useful that ends up being.

I hope I get a partner tomorrow who also isn't super clear on Javascript. I know there are a few people who already know it and are with it, I feel like they'd just end up feeling like things are going to slow and I don't get it if we are paired.

They took down the Tumblr links, so nobody is reading this now. It's time to reveal all my secrets without fear!

Actually, I have a lot of fear right now. The big big assessment is tomorrow, and I don't feel so good about it. I talked to Leen and Daniel about it, and I guess I know more than I feel I do, but it's just so overwhelming. :(

We had a vote on what we'd do regarding study hall, and one person caused the majority to vote on take the assessment one hour after class starts over take the assessment after lunch, having the entire time until then to study. I think that's proof that Democracy is Bad. What we need is a Topptalitarian Pizzatatorship. I'd force everyone who voted for the former option to dance saucily for me.

Last night I didn't sleep more than a couple of hours because I was busy going over the assessment, trying to figure out why my authenticity token wasn't working (I forgot to enclose it in an erb tag). Now I feel like I don't have much time to sleep. Well, if things don't go well tomorrow, I'll have plenty of time for sleep.

Today, I played it smart, and only had half a cup of coffee. I also brought some fud to snack on so that I wouldn't be on a completely empty stomach, since I heard sugar in coffee (and milk I guess?) is what gives you energy for the metabolism increase it causes you, and since I drank it black, I needed something else to fill me up.

We started off the day with study hall, and I began to go over the practice assessment again, starting with what I knew. It's so daunting. There's just so many pieces to it.

However, our project of the day was more of the same, with some add-ons. Today we had to build a clone of Le Reddit. Le Epic Le Memez Le Super Secret Club Le Reddit!!!!11 Did you know in the old N64 games, Donkey Kong fortells the future? Really, he does. Listen to him in Mario Party 2 or Mario Kart 64 for example. He says, "Reddit! Reddit!" Yes. Donkey Kong was a Redditor before it was hip and with it. No really, listen!

Like the 99 Cats Auth project, I thought this one went well too. I got another partner who was easygoing and good to work with, and I felt like I knew a little more than before as we went through the project. There were even parts where I was able to do by myself! Not that I rushed ahead or anything. I checked in with my partner to make sure we were going on the same path, and we were able to build the Le Reddit Clone which I will name Dreadit, at least up to where it has nested comments. We got it so users could register and sign on, make subs, make posts, and make comments.

It's actually quite a bit of work, and there's a lot of code that can be made more DRY, but I think it was good assessment practice, and I feel like the progress we made was Quite Good.

One part both of us weren't sure about was the inverse of added to our association in Post. The easiest way I can understand it, is when an association needs a value of something to not be nil, but it is nil, because you're trying to build things that rely on each other at the same time, giving inverse of let's you build as if you have the values you need as being not nil, and if it validates successfully, it'll continue its course like normal. It took me a while to get, and I'm still not sure I really get it, but Daniel said it isn't particularly common, and Rails tends to do most of the inverses for you anyway. I don't getit... how I dreadit! If you see this post, it means you readit!

Quite a few people also stayed after to practice for the assessment. What I find seems to help is to do the assessment, one file at a time, making sure I memorize it, know what goes into it, as well as understanding it. I feel like I'm so far off still from getting the assessment down, and I don't expect to succeed... but I'll try my best, and at the very worst, I'll have at least learned enough to start building my own web apps. :) :(

We also had one of our cohort mates depart today. I think it was voluntary. Our cohort is still at large, but from what I've heard, the number might start shrinking more towards the last half. :S

I also learned over the weekend and today about messing with web pages through inspect elements! It's a lot of fun. I'm going to definitely play around with that more and as I learn more about web development, hopefully utilize that for performing some fun and saucy tricks. :0) Until then, I need to cram out the studies for this scary exam.

Today was a solo day, but I couldn't get very much out of it due to my mistake of drinking coffee. Even though I drank it around 9:30 AM, by 1:30 AM, I was still wide awake. :( So testing out sleep over studies didn't happen this time.

We were supposed to work on the Music App, and it wanted us to try and do as much of it as we could without consulting any references for the Auth part. I was both way too drowsy and tired to focus, so sadly, I wasn't very productive.

I did get some practice in on memorizing parts of Auth, but overall, it wasn't a day I'm proud of unlike the day before.

We also had to do an in-class practice assessment. I did terribly, because the parts I memorized were only worth 2 specs. With the amount of time we have before the real assessment, I'm not confident I'll get it down in time. I made lots of flashcards and hopefully by the time test day comes, I'll be able to answer them all with great confidence.

So for anyone reading my blog, this post is going to be short and not very sweet because I don't have much else to say, because as I've said, it's an unproductive day without much to be proud of. :-(

Today ended up a surprisingly good day! Despite my terrifically terrible failures the yesterday and the day before that, I felt like things went well.

We started off with lecture, going over most of the topics covered in last night's homework. This involved cookies, sessions, and CSRF (Cross-Site-Request-Forgery). I had hoped the lecture would go more into CSRF, since those were the videos I started to lose focus on, but then it later turned out to be much simpler than I thought.

We had to take the 99 Cats project from the day before, and work on it with a new partner. They gave us a skeleton of the previous day's project completed, so that we wouldn't have to do it over, but most of the focus was on creating authentication.

I also had coffee for the first time in my life today. I've been running previously on none of that, because I never had a reason to, and I hate Java, but I gave in for the first time because trying to get sleep while getting as much work done as possible just didn't go together. Thanks, App Academy!

I had it black, and it didn't taste very good. But it definitely seemed to give me what I needed to focus better than usual, although I also had constant nausea all day for some reason?

Regardless, the project went smoothly, and we got close to finishing, while understanding and asking lots of questions as we went along. We ended up with a nice app that had a log in, log out, sign up, and authentication features, and it was really satisfying to see all that come together. We also got code reviews along the way to make sure we were on the right track, and my partner even made some 'wild attempts' that actually turned out to be exactly what we were expected to do. So overall, it was quite a satisfying day.

I also got lots of test tips from cohort mates as well as Daniel, and I think that also helped in improving my mood, because now I feel a lot better about how to approach things. My partner told me that his way is to prioritize sleep and solutions over readings and homework, so I'm going to give that a try tomorrow and see how it goes. If it means I can take everything in a lot easier and better, then maybe it'll be what I need to stay in the program.

So I should probably keep this short, and be sure I'm ready for bed before midnight, or even 11 PM.

Those of us who had a retake exam took that today this afternoon and - predictably, but also unpredictably, I failed - again. I can't decide if I should be glad it wasn't because I didn't understand the material, or if I should be mad it was because I got tripped up and started to doubt myself when I failed to catch where I overwrote an association and it led to nil, rather than to the correct model. Since the end result is all that matters in this case - I'd say bad.

One thing I should practice, since I don't think anxiety is going to be something I'll manage before assessment six (if I even make it that far), is to be sure I have effective and quick ways to debug each assessment. Had Leen not been there to help me with that mysterious and baffling house error, who is to say how long I would have been sitting there, pondering how my failure to associate would put A/A on the road to also fail to associate with me anymore? Just when I'm really starting to feel the pressure, this week onward until further notice is given, the campus is only open from 7AM - 9PM.

We did lose one person during the retake, and I'm already picturing my picture being wiped from the classmates portion of Progress Tracker. Despite my optimistically pessimistic pessimism, I'm not going to give up until I actually am done for. Saturday will give me a good idea of what to watch out for, and from there, I'll implement debugging strategies. I'm told this one will be more memorization focused and repeating writing the same methods over and over, so here's hoping that plays in my favor, since I seem to have that sort of thing down when practicing assessments. Assuming I make it to Javascript, that is one assessment I dread will end me.

The morning started with lecture, and we dived into Views. Where Controllers fetches data, the Views of a Rails app decides how to present the information the Controller gives it, and renders it to the browser - usually via HTML.

We went over examples of that, and also saw some how-to on ERB (Embedded Ruby, where HTML and Ruby come together), so we got to see and learn how to do renders based on the routes taken, a bit of form action, and also incorporating partials so we can DRY our renders.

It's a lot to take in, and we applied what we had read up on with 99 Cats today. I'm referring to my notes a lot, and definitely by next Wednesday, I want to be able to do everything up to creating 99Cats without any notes - not just for the sake of the assessment, but it's something I'm going to want to be able to do anyway moving forward.

We had lots of videos today, and unfortunately, I couldn't get to watch them all before we had to leave the building. Tomorrow is a continuation of 99Cats with authentication involved, but we haven't finished 99Cats itself yet. I guess we'll see how it goes, and Saturday will be study hall/solo day, so I'll take the fullest advantage of that I can.

Due to unusual circumstances, App Academy was closed Monday and Tuesday, so today is technically the first day of Week 4. It also means we'll have class Saturday (solo day again!) to make up for the schedule change.

We started the day off with the assessment. I failed. :( I'm pretty sure it was all just through associations. I was sure I had the logic of it down, but clearly not. I think this time, it was much move divisive on who passed and who didn't.

Fortunately, there's a retake taking place tomorrow, due to the events of last week throwing everything off. I don't expect to pass this one either, but I'll try. :( I'm just slow when it comes to associations. I made a map and linked up all the associations before even starting, and that didn't help when it came to the last few. I don't know what some of the other people's strategies were for getting through it so quickly (I hear one person finished half an hour early), but I wish I had their secret. I stressed out over this more than the first two, and failing it tells me there are a couple of possibilities:

A) I'm just really Slow and Bad at SQL and Associations B) I'm just really Bad at Test Taking C) I'm just really Bad at Studying Effectively D) I'm just really Not Cut Out For Programming E) All of the Above F) A, B, C G) B, C, D H) B, C I) None of the Below

Whether or not I succeed tomorrow afternoon on the retake, it's not like a whole lot will change. I will still have anxiety of being in the TA's office with Leen and Tommy as I'm told the trapdoor is about to fall below me, and Leen will be there to help if possible. Daniel too? :-)? If I manage to pass, I'm still going to be checking in with them. Either way, I'll just be having test taking anxiety until the final assessment - and then I can move on to job interview anxiety. Yay!

I think job interviews will be better though. The worst they can do is not hire me, and I can see it as an opportunity to learn how to interview, I guess, and see what sort of coding challenges they'll offer. If I get the braces problem, I should be ready for that one this time around.

After the exam was over, we had lecture, and it was going over Routes and Controllers in Rails. The way I understand it, routes just tells web pages how to interact with a Rails app, and controllers are created per user to allow interactions to take place. For our project today, my partner and I had to get CRUD to work. Create, Read, Update, Destroy. We managed to get through all of those at its very simplest, and I think have a basic understanding of it. My partner likes asking lots of questions, and that's the kind of partner I feel most comfortable with. Studying the solutions and understanding how Rails works underneath the hood will help boost my confidence a little - either way, being able to do CRUD is the very base of the next assessment I hear - so being able to do it all with my eyes shut is going to be important! I mean, understanding everything is important too.

Tomorrow we have a project called 99 Cats. It's a two day project, so I hope my partner and I get along tomorrow. The TA's really seem to like their cats and dogs, but not due to personal preference or anything, I think the clone app should be 99 Pizzas.

Solo day today! Our project was to build ActiveRecord Lite.

I woke up with a bad headache, and had to take some medicine as a result before heading out. Two days ago, a really really late N/R train resulted in me making it to App Academy at 8:57 AM - just 3 minutes to spare. So now I try to leave earlier than usual.

I sat where I sat on W3D2. My partner was the same person from yesterday! So although we were solo, it meant we could still ask each other for help as we went along.

The day started off with lots of solutions. Unfortunately, I couldn't get the assessment to run on the computer because of what seems to be big version differences (that fixing the Gemfile didn't mend) and it was late so I ended up being unable to take it.

After a long lecture of solutions and going over metaprogramming concepts (which involved method_missing, define_method, and send), we were sent off to start on our first solo day.

I was excited! I would be working along, and we also had Rspecs to go along with it. Plus, it wasn't like I was totally alone. I had a partner I was familiar with I could ask questions, and also the TA's. It was pleasing.

Of course, it got off to a bit of a rough start. The custom attr_reader attr_writer methods which were simply put together as attr_accessor was rather confusing at first. But once we deciphered it was simply calling a method the same way we usually do, just with more interpolation and reflection. I only got to the second set of specs, which were quite long, but as I worked through them, I started to better understand how ActiveRecord works. Different methods had to be custom defined and some had to include SQL queries, including columns, finalize!, table_name, all, parse_all, and attribute. I approached each of these by sticking debugger into it and trying to figure out what works. I thought maybe this was cheating, but Leen later said that was actually a really good thing to do, especially since it can help you figure out what you really have in there.

At first, my partner was getting ahead on his ARL. Then I started pushing ahead. Then he got the lead on me again. Even though we weren't 'pairing', we still helped each other out, and definitely without one another, I think both of us would've found that we were stuck in places much longer.

The day seemed to go by quite quickly, and towards the end of the day, Leen pulled me in to the office to check up on me. I talked to her about some of my insecurities, things I wasn't clear on, and she also gave me some pointers about the upcoming assessment and some common problems that were encountered during SQL and assocations. I'm glad I decided to start checking in, it definitely has helped me find a much better direction in my App Academy quest.

After, we pushed to Github and had to start the Friday circle time. We would get to finish up ActiveRecord Lite and do Rails Lite later on, so that meant two more solo days were coming at the very least.

The group was pretty standard. I also shared two stories related to my previous internship, including one about an applicant who showed high technical proficiency, but was bumbling enough to post their Facebook on their resume.

At the end of the day, we were told that unfortunately, App Academy would not be open during this weekend. That puts quite a damper on my pair programming plan - it means we'll have to change plans and still try to make it work somehow.

Finally, for the first time in three weeks, I went to the gym. Turns out after that long, doing warmup squats of 95 lbs have become difficult, where before I could easily do it without a sweat. Ouch. I need to force myself to go at least once a week, or else I'm in big trouble.

I've been getting through most of this week without very much sleep. I'm really feeling it now, the fatigue is making my head and eyes hurt as a result.

We started off the day with study hall. My partner and I looked over N+1, then got started on our Polls project. Fortunately, neither of us had really any a-Polls-ing feelings about how to begin.

SQL week so far seems to be pairs of repetition. First and second day, raw SQL, SQL with Ruby included. Day three and four, ActiveRecord, extra ActiveRecord built up.

First, we drew out some diagrams and guidelines for how our tables would be designed, as well as mapping out which foreign keys would point to where for our associations. I know having a reference helped me a lot, and other than a few bumps when attempting migrations and Postgres DB startup, things went pretty smoothly. We also had some fun with the data we seeded, but hit a roadblock once we reached the point where we had to make sure users couldn't vote in the same poll twice. Misinterpretation of very vague instructions led us to pondering for at least an hour (including TA help) over how we were supposed to check if a user already voted in a poll when our sibling_responses method was meant to filter out ourself????

As it turned out though, we were supposed to check BEFORE we added it to the database - at which point, the response ID would be nil, but the user_id wouldn't be, so we could check in that way and get the desired results! Throughout the day, I also learned a few shortcuts, because my partner is a shortcut-wiki, and seemed to be on the up and up on all sorts of details previous partners often don't notice.

We did make it to the end, but didn't get to the bonus. Our day ended early, because at 5, the previous cohort was graduating, and they were going to showcase their work to prospective employers. They brought in lots of pizza (not for us) and even offered beer - I didn't take any, because who is to say I won't get drunk and try to stab myself with the bottle, thinking it's a... sp-beer???

There were some cool stuff, but I didn't get to see most of it because we had to leave before the employers arrived. The one that seemed to have gotten a lot of notice was a game where you had to draw Pokemon. It involved a picture on the left, and you had to try to match it as closely as possible on the right. If I had my wacom tablet, I would've without a doubt, aced it. Everyone in the room would've stood up and clapped, I would be given the key to the city, and Google and Facebook would do a joint employment plan for me so I could draw Bulbasaur for them and get cheered right out of the room.

Seeing that people made Javascript games helped me understand what the mysterious weeks 10-12 were about. Week 8-9 is when we have to do our Capstone, which is done in Javascript, and requires us to create a clone. Week 10-12, we design our own project, and showcase that and get the new cohort to check it out and be amazed. It's hard to believe that we'll be expected to design these games in a little less than two months along with a clone. I doubt I could design my way out of a pizza box at this point.

So that resulted in us leaving a little early, and tonight, we prepare by practicing the practice assesment, and getting ready to work solo tomorrow. I caught a cohort mate and Leen on the train home, and she told us tomorrow, the TAs will be very busy because many people will have lots of questions, so I guess I'll have to hope some pals near me will be willing to help. I actually look forward to solo day! But who knows, I might find it boring, but.. double down on insisting it's triple the fun! Maybe I'll even go to the gym after and do some s-quads. I haven't worked out since A/A started. :-(

One of my cohort mates told me about this neato trick where if you highlight your Tumblr post text, you get this cool popup that lets you format it in a flash!!!

But I tried it just now and it doesn't work. :( So you're just getting boring text.

Today I got paired up with someone I got through Jumpstart with together. We studied through it together, and today we studied through the day together!

I approached the day, trying to do it the way Daniel recommended and hoping I'd get a knowledge pay. So how did go, you may say?

I think it went pretty well. Studying the solutions first and foremost and reading it over to myself helped me feel a little more confident about the start of lecture! :-) But I felt less comfortable about diving back into Rails/ActiveRecord. :-( Fortunately, my partner was All Good about taking our time and making sure we knew what we were doing, step by step, and asking Plenty of Questions? to poor Fred, who got the brunt of our queries.

Interestingly, we were shown a quick plan of what the rest of our class would be like, and how it'd culminate with the Capstone project. What made that so interesting is I went over all of the course curriculum to see when we did what for a sneak peek, and then I got a double peek as a result! Maybe I should try repeatedly to peek at practice assessments??

Things started out slow, but by the end of the day, I felt like I had a better grasp of ActiveRecord than when the day started. I still have difficulty piecing together how belongs_to, has_many, has_one work in terms of code, but I found that drawing a visual map with all the keys and showing what points where helps me manage that much better than just trying to go through it by code.

We started off with just practicing associations. We did this for a mock course enrollment project. I started off rusty, and gave Maurice the rustiest combluxactsionizably response when he asked about Course class's has_many relationship to Enrollment. He was simply just looking for that Enrollment belongs_to Course. :-(

I got better as the day went by, and we made it up to finishing Phase III of the URL Shortener project. One issue I have is my mind starts to wander off onto things that are not necessarily the point of the exercise, or should even matter to it. For example, our mock URL Shortener was going to return a randomized string created from Base64, and I ended up asking Fred if we had to format said string so that when the user got it back as the short URL, if it had to include "http://" or anything like that.

It's not that I think about the irrelevant things on purpose, but at the moment, it's what I consider and wonder how I'll work that in to our code because it seems like it'll be tricky - but as it stands, it's something I need to get myself to not think about because in this case, the exercise was just to get us practicing associations, migrating, and creating Models and tables - not creating a more complete app.

One thing I discovered though was upon going home and comparing solutions, the last revision on our repo was said to be at 2 PM.. which really stressed me out! It means that we somehow messed up a commit, because I remember committing several times after 2, but we were missing a lot of methods and even view.rb, which I noticed when I noticed how sparse our solution was compared to A/A's, and then it dawned on me something had gone very wrong. I just hope tomorrow, it's still there and not wiped out so I can push it properly! That was really upsetting and I didn't think I would let something like that happen.

I also talked to another cohort mate who I'd met a few weeks prior to the cohort start date, and we discussed how we'd approaching studying for the next assessment. We both still feel shaky on SQL, and I proposed on Saturday, we come in and do pair programming together through SQLZoo and the practice assessments we'll get to make sure we're more solid on it all. I think we're both at about the same level, in terms of what we struggle with, and how we approach things, so although we may end up getting stuck more than if one of us were much higher than the other, I think it'll be great for making sure we get our material down! I'll keep this blog... posted. :-)

Tomorrow we have to build a Poll app. It will just be study hall, so I don't know how I'll fare throughout the day. Taking it slower definitely helped a lot today, and I hope I can do more of the same tomorrow and feel ready for building our own custom ActiveRecord on Friday. I just feel I'm so slow sometimes, especially with certain concepts, and trying to sort it out in a way that I can easily understand. Maybe someday, I can write an App Academy For Dummies, publish it, and shelve it in my self.help section. :-)

I stayed up a lot later than usual last night, trying to get my readings done, as well as figuring out what went wrong with my assessment. Within 10 minutes, I was able to figure out most of the issues that I should've been able to during the assessment - but alas, I didn't.

The only thing that really stumped me was Freecell's Tableau population. I couldn't get the specs to pass and kept getting nil. When I finally turned to the solutions and tried to find my answer? The help that ended up being was nil! So I submitted what I had and said to myself I'd ask questions at study hall.

Come morning, I go over it again one more time before I ask the TA's for help, in case it's something ridiculous. Lo and behold - it needed a redefined .count method. And I had started to fill one out but left it blank! Upon filling it in with @cards.count..... everything passed.

Ugggh. Bad. Bad. These are the sorts of mistakes I can't afford to make. Well, this time I was barely able to afford it... but if I want to Stress Less, I have to make sure my code isn't a mess, I bess make sure my code imp ress.

We continued SQL today, incorporating Ruby code in with it, calling queries and doing very similar work to yesterday. I think a lot of cohort mates found this incredibly repetitive and uninteresting. I don't really mind it, and I tried to have fun with the data we had to seed our tables with.

I'm still having trouble wrapping my head around JOIN. My partner gave me an explanation that was helpful, but it's mostly about making the connections and keeping track of them. It's like my brain fogs up and decides, JOIN? I'm not JOINing anything! I'm antisocial! On the other hand, I think I did a pretty good job of spotting syntax errors and typos. I'm also finding byebug to be an amazing answer to the sort of debugging I really wanted doing the prepwork, but never ended up using. I imagine that would've streamlined my debugging process so much and saved me many hours.

SQL ends today though, and tomorrow we're supposed to move on to ActiveRecord, which is supposed to let us do all the confusing booty mctooties of SQL without the hassle in Rails. Wow!!

Around lunch, I was talking to another cohort mate (again) about feeling like I'll get called in due to my assessment scores, and once again, he told me not to sweat it, and drew Daniel into the conversation. That led to me telling him a bit more about my concerns, and that led to us going over to talk to Leen (my Friday circle leader), and asking if she'd be okay with checking in on me every week. I think this is will be helpful for me, as I tend to get a little overwhelmed and lost if I don't have some sort of direction, and talking to the TAs turned out to be just what I needed.

Since Leen is still teaching Jumpstart and has to do so at the new building A/A has, I can check in with Daniel after class is over instead.

So that's what I did today, and it was great having someone I could talk to about some of my concerns and worries. Pair programming for example, is where I'm concerned of being too slow to grasp what is being done, and then having a partner who is most displeased with me. It seems no one has decided to tar and feather me yet though.

I got some tips I think that will be very useful to me from here on forth. The basic gist is: Prioritize each night's solutions over readings and homework - making sure I have a most solid, not liquid or gaseous, understanding of what I did today at a high level is going to help me much more than focusing more on the next day. Have a wider scope of focus instead of on particular methods or end of the day work is also a plus. In terms of speed, speed is not what we want (at least outside assessments), but understanding the material. If I need to slow a partner down to Get It, I shouldn't feel afraid to do so.

Having this set of ideas in my mind, the solutions were the first thing I started combing over tonight, and I feel better about what direction to take my studies in. How well I will fare has yet to be seen, but I'm also practicing discussing the solutions out loud to myself, as well as the readings, in order to help cement what it is I'm looking over.

Tomorrow is probably going to be Blogger Project 2.0. Not looking forward to it (still have sleep deprivation from the BP Rush of 2016 after learning the prepwork was due the WEDNESDAY before A/A, not SUNDAY), but maybe the prior sufferings will bear fruits... of more suffering. :-) :-( >:-)?

Today, we had our second assessment. I studied for this one more than the previous assessment, and also made sure to get in my homework for W3D1... otherwise, the series would end here and there'd be... no SQL!

I made the cutoff mark... again. It's terrible because I basically have in the back of my mind the entire day, did I get it? Did I not get it? I had really hoped I'd do well enough to clear that doubt from my mind, but it didn't happen. Am I doomed to play chicken with the cutoff mark until the very end? Boy I hope not.

We were told ahead of time we'd be building Freecell. I got a bit of a surprise in the form of having to modify the Card class, and having an additional Game class, which wasn't in the practice assessment. The Game class was really all that tripped me up. I think with even just 10 more minutes, I could have sealed certainty that I did well enough that I wouldn't have to worry about the executioner's axe. But alas, either because I hopped too much or too little, that wasn't the case. :( I had the practice assessment down to 1/5 the time too, but clearly that isn't enough.

This means I'm left worried about SQL and ActiveRecord. It is, more or less, completely new territory, and I'm afraid of not comprehending it. Mostly, I start to get confused and lose track of things once I have to keep track of a bunch of different things/flow in my head, like when we have to use multiple JOINs or subqueries. But I hope this next coming assessment is more straightforward, in that, if I know how to do SQLZoo, I just have to make sure my JOIN and psql skills will be enough to do better than just enough on the assessment.

I know they say not to worry too much about the assessment, but... easier said than done. It's kind of the big kahuna, the big balooga, the fig bazooka, that says, hey, don't mess me up, buddy! and it's like the Grim Reaper of Bad Code is looming over you, with an Exception-al Sickle, ready to be raised and swiping your head off before anyone can come to your rescue.

It wouldn't surprise me if I get called in tomorrow... like hey friend, you passed both assessments, but I mean, you were real close there. Like one sliver away from the edge of the cliff, the yellow line of the subway platform, the last bit of breath that may be exactly what you need to dive underwater and make it to the other side of the cave. What's your next plan, Pin the Tail on the Rim of the Volcano????

The worst part is I work best late at night. I'm like an owl, if owls were soft and died if they spun their neck too far. 9 to 6 is tough cause it's from AM to PM. If it were switched from PM to AM? I think I'd find my gr00ve.

Regardless, our first day of SQL wasn't too bad. It's mostly about repetition so far, but I'm antsy about every day forward from now on. Tomorrow we have to create an AA Questions app. Everything else that involved Ruby, came easier because I know Ruby, but SQL is like a whole new syntax. it's always shouting at you too, it's very SELECTive about it and WHERE it does it, but as someone coming out FROM a very quiet room, it feels foreign... key point, I'm worried it'll be rough.

I think one thing that would help is if my contacts didn't get blurry on me all the damn time. It increases negative feelings of, oh, my eyes must be giving out cause my brain is frying out???, so I should probably have contact solution on me at all times. I have my toothbrush with me though, cause trying to code and pairing with bad/gross feeling mouth or breath wouldn't do either of us a favor.

Friday is a solo day. I'm actually looking forward to that. As much as I like pair programming, the idea of working at my own own pace, but having people near me I can talk to and ask for help, as opposed to having been completely solo with only Google for so long, sounds really appealing to me. Of course, it might also turn out that I'll be utterly stuck when working on my own, and I'll secretly pair with someone until one of the TA's chase me away with a broom. Oh no!

I continued to feel unwell, so I wore a face mask today. If you didn't know, you could've mistaken me for a surgeon... but I ain't the App Academy.. operator!!

Due to feeling sick though, I ended up sleeping very poorly, due to waking up at 4 and being unable to sleep till 6. :(

The day started with study hall, and I went over the broken assessment and got it to eventually pass. I also started to ponder how to create Freecell in terms of our assessment. One thing I feel they'll have us do:

Get a card from one of the stacks.

Check if that card is the last in the stack array.

If it isn't, iterate to the end and make sure the stack is in descending order by 1, and that the colors alternate.

Make sure that the number of cards being moved isn't more than the number of FreeCells left.

That is just speculative of course, so I'll see whether or not they do give that to us as part of our test.

No lecture today, and we got straight into creating our own hash map. I was hoping we would get one, but I guess there's going to be variances throughout. Next Friday for example, we are going to have a solo day, so no pairing, but we'll also have Happy Hour again, for those who love beer.

We had to start by creating simpler sets. We started with IntSets, and had to go all the way to creating Linked Lists, a Hash Map, then finally, a LRU - Least Recently Used cache.

My partner was helpful today, and seemed to be very good at explaining things to me in a way that allowed me to understand fairly quickly, given my usual slow mental process. This helped especially when we got to Linked Lists, which threw me off the same way TreeNodes did a week ago, and we made good progress I feel. We got to Phase 5 of 6, and couldn't make it to the last one because we got stuck on a bug with our Linked List and Hash Map. The way our Linked List was set up, when it reassigned a @head, it never bothered reassigning it to its next. This resulted in us getting nil for one of our Links, and by the time we were starting to come to figure it out, it was time for Friday's circle group.

In this group session, we talked a little about diversity. Interestingly enough, I think our group was the most diverse out of the four, but we didn't have very much to say on the topic itself. I did throw in that my previous internship was basically just minorities, and it was one of the best experiences I've had at a job to date. But there wasn't a whole lot of discussion on the matter, but I wonder what the other groups said in regards to it.

Next week, we're starting SQL. I think based on what I've heard, most of us are going to be going into SQL completely blind, and I've also heard people express they liked this, because then we'd all start on the same level. I feel like I'll still end up feeling like the weakest link. :0(

More importantly, our assessment is Monday. I have plans to go to the gym and then A/A tomorrow, but we'll see what happens. I'll keep wearing my mask to make sure I'm not spreading anything, and the environment should help make studying easier. As my partner from this Wednesday said, it's better to come in Saturday than Sunday since if I'm going to need more polishing up, having that extra day is better than having none.