Last night I had a dream. I was trapped in a binary world and was being made to dig my own grave by a giant hashtag.
It wasn't the first coding dream I'd had this week, but all the others have been about problems I'd been stuck on and possible solutions for them, whereas this was obviously a lot more abstract. I shared the dream on our Makers Academy Slack channel and got a brilliant response -
"Don't worry, in this course we execute the code and not the other way around."I wish I'd thought of that.
Week 3 of the Makers Academy pre-course has been all about Ruby - the coding language we will largely be studying. It's really flexible, certainly more so than any other coding language I've used. I struggled a bit with the whole object orientated aspect of the language, having being more used to top-down programming, but I'm getting the hang of it.
I decided to go back to the beginning of Chris Pine's Learn To Program book, which was something we were asked to read up to chapter 8 before our interview. I figured it had been a couple of months and in going over it all again I'd get a better understanding. I think it's helped as I'm starting to understand how to do things, or at least feel as if I'm getting there, but I'm really struggling to remember all the terms (as in method, variable, argument, etc etc). This can be problematic when trying to understand a question and I find myself referring to multiple notes and taking much longer to get things done. So there's been a lot of late nights.
The challenges in the Learn To Program book started to get much much harder, and so I decided to go for the alternative option of Ruby-Kickstart - so far so good. Ruby-Kickstart seems a lot more user friendly and I'm working through it at a nice pace.
And then...
Our Friday Challenge was to sign up for Codewars, where you earn points by solving coding challenges and problems. Our task was to get 60 points before the weekend was out, and 125 before the course begins for real (in 8 days now, argh!). The prize? A sticker! Oh man, I love me a sticker!!
Getting a 125 points is not the biggest problem with this challenge (well, it's still a problem as there's a lot of tricky stuff on Codewars), oh no! The biggest problem is that nobody mentioned how ridiculously addictive Codewars is. It's like coding cocaine. Very moreish.
I'm just going to attempt one more, then I'll stop. Just one more, then I'll go to bed. I could stop anytime I wanted to. Honestly...
...10 hours later.
So by the end of week 3, sleep is a thing of the past, I'm having bizarre Codewars infused dreams, and I'm loving every minute of it!
I know at this stage my code is not always 'pretty'. Most of the time I'm getting there and it runs, but I know I need to stop repetition and work on easier more concise ways of doing things. I also know there are many areas of Ruby I just don't understand at all - Blocks, Procs, Lambdas etc etc, but I'll get there...
Oh, and by the way.
Currently, at the end of the day today, I check out of Codewars with 178 points! Now where's my sticker... (mic drop).
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