What did you learn today?

Brainstorming and product design were the focus of today. After our morning toy problem on rotateMatrix, I went to lecture to learn about git workflow, rebasing, GitHub issues, and scrum. Lecture went well enough, but I have to say I was quite bored.

Sometimes, I think the lecture content could contain more detail or could be restructured. For this lecture, the content was mostly glossed over, and we were expected to learn most of it on our own by reading sources and googling on our own. I especially like the latter expectation; however, I think instructors and students would benefit more from reading through the repo and supporting links before coming to lecture. By doing so, students can ask questions on particular topics and use of a voting mechanism like slido. HackReactor instruction employed this strategy for much of the first week which was content heavy, and I think the approach was a better use of everyone’s time. I digress.

At the end of lecture, we received our Greenfield groups. My new group of four will have one week to create an application to demo. We’re planning to build a jukebox music application for managing a party play list from any internet enabled device. We’re hoping to stretch our programming capabilities by fiddling around with OAuth, multiple APIs, and ionic (a mobile SDK that makes use of CSS, HTML, Angular, and JS components).

I was also finally able to solve the asyncMap and arraySum problems. The first was much more difficult then I anticipated, and I made use of functional programming and references to indices in a Javascript array to store the return from asynchronous function calls. The latter was much easier than I anticipated. I simply had to keep a current running total of summed values in an array and make two key comparisons with Math.max to traverse the array in learning time.

Did you learn anything new about yourself?

I’m surprised about how much I’ve learned from Design Thinking and Entrepreneurship that I’ve been able to put into practice today. My group brainstormed well by focusing on ideas rather than implementation, and we discussed the user journey to help guide our feature selection.

Anything you want to do differently tomorrow?

I want to practice touch typing with my right pinky. I know this sounds odd, but I never actually learned how to touch type. I’m pretty terrible with my right pinky, which slows me down a lot since I’m more prone to making syntax mistakes. These are generally auto-corrected in Sublime Text, but I’ll add this my list of self-improvement tasks.