What did you learn today?

My pair and I finished making corrections to our music player application early. We played around with extra-credit by adding some additional view interactions, model triggers, collection listeners, and model updates. Then, we spent the rest of the day learning on our own by reading code articles and refactoring toy problems.

I feel good about my progress in the curriculum, and I feel like I need to push myself harder on front-end work. I need to take some of these existing applications and build out more features and design them well. I feel like I barely have enough time to work on the existing toy problems, sprints, and keep up with reflecting so I need to re-allocate my time accordingly.

A surprise also surfaced in my inbox later in the afternoon. I received an email from a technical mentor about my third self-assessment. The email outlined improvements I could make on that self-assessment. It turns out that I completely forgot to respond to one of the prompts on algorithm time complexities. Additionally, I omitted some critical lines of code for a proper sub-class in JavaScript. I revised those over the next half hour and submitted another pull request with the update. The exercise was a great reminder of the technical detail and focus that the program demands of its students.

Did you learn anything new about yourself?

I’m exercising more patience when I encounter bugs in programs. I’ve been reminding myself that programs are often in a broken state or state of repair. I’m not broken; the program is broken. I found myself saying that in my head a lot today.

Anything you want to do differently tomorrow?

I’d like to update one of the previous sprints that I did. I think I’ll tackle n-queens first by re-factoring the code. If time allows, I’ll attempt to code a bitwise solution using recursion.