What did you learn today?

I need to be on the look out for patterns and opportunities to reuse code as I continue through the program. Some of our toy problems, which prepare us for interviews towards the last two weeks of the program, can be solved using similar approaches in code. Edge cases, inputs, and outputs, might change between the problems, but I suspect that I will encounter many toy problems that can be solved with the similar approaches.

I also learned that I need to be more proactive and patient about reading documentation to figure out how something works. I became frustrated when I couldn’t get a CSS animation to function as intended. I worked for about a half hour to do this, and then, my pair and I eventually asked for help from another member in our cohort who is well versed in CSS.

It’s hard because I feel like I wasted a lot of time trying to figure out how the code should work. I think this is more of a fault of the documentation and other websites which could show a variety of examples with proper syntax. I know it’s not feasible to do this for all features, but I feel like I always stumble upon some nuance that isn’t captured in the documentation. For instance, I learned that keystrokes or key frames for animations can have multiple properties set at each way point in the animation. These properties should be listed inline with a space between and NOT a comma. I couldn’t find any examples of this so I’m not sure if I should have searched harder or requested help from an expert sooner. If anything, I think documentation should really be more than a description of what the code is supposed to do with multiple examples that progress from novice to intermediate and expert uses of the code snippet or functionality.

Did you learn anything new about yourself?

I like solving toy problems. I like learning more deeply about algorithms, and I can’t wait to learn more about back-end development.

Anything you want to do differently tomorrow?

I got dinner with two members of my cohort who I had not met. That was nice. I still need to schedule a dinner with a close friend in San Francisco so I’ll stick with that.