DEV Community: Lily

Day 3_ Building Consistency

Lily — Sat, 03 Oct 2020 22:35:34 +0000

I didn't do much coding today. I just finished a Hacker rank challenge and today it was on operators. Did I forget how to do something and spend almost thirty minutes on the question? Yes, yes I did. At least I understood the question well this time... I forgot to input the parameter values and didn't understand why the code was failing. I had to do a quick search on how to call a function before I realised my horrible silly mistake.

Apart from that, I spent the whole day wireframing and planning out an app for my systems analysis and design class. I think it came out okay although Figma was giving me a hard time selecting and grouping components at some point.

Tomorrow I'll work on more assignments and the mobile view of my web technologies group project. I'll also make sure to start an actual project. There seems to be less and less time daily.

Therefore, Hi Lily!
Today you did great. You completed a whole assignment in a day, attended two events and did your challenge. Not only that, but you were able to document it (sort of). I know you're tired, I know it won't be easy everyday and you may be more tired in the future especially with you internship starting in a few days. It will be worth it though. Don't forget it.

Day 2 Struggles & Victory!

Lily — Fri, 02 Oct 2020 23:38:38 +0000

It's almost 11:30 pm as I type this. Today I actually planned to rest and use my Friday night for leisure activities. I had a coaching session and told my coachee that's what I would do. Fortunately or unfortunately, I didn't.

So I did today's Hackerrank challenge. It took longer than I expected and when I finally got it right I felt...kinda dumb but only for the first few minutes. It was on Data Types and basically I had to get user input of different types (int, float & string), sum them to their already declared variable matches and display them on new lines.

It was easy, true. But, your girl didn't read the question well enough so omitted the input part from her solution and kept going at it for almost thirty minutes. I mean it worked for the sample test case but not the hidden one so I was confused. When I figured it out too, I was making very silly mistakes. I was getting a headache... and it's only day two AND I already know the basics of Python. Sigh.

Anyway, I've learnt to always read and understand questions clearly before I tackle a problem. I'll be more conscious of it now because I don't want to go through that again.

There's something good that came out of that though. My mind was more alert and ready to do some work. Fortunately, I could finally install and get a particular version of Angular to work for a project I was doing as part of the Google Africa Developers' Scholarship Program. Mind you this wasn't working for the past three days. Now although previously I had reached module 3, I had to start all over again and frankly, I needed that refresher. I wanted to stop at 4 and sleep but I wasn't ready to take any risks in case the installation wanted to switch up on me again. So I completed it and I'm very very relieved. I guess the leisure day would have to be moved to tomorrow morning :)

So Lily, next time:

Don't procrastinate.
Ask for help (looking through responses from other people's issues don't count please).
Take your time.
Read and understand. If you get it wrong, take a deep breath and go at it again.
Also, try working in WSL more to save yourself stress.
You'll be fine, you won't get overwhelmed. You can do this.
Hold on to your faith, it won't let you down even when you want to give up on yourself especially.

Well this is sudden...

Lily — Thu, 01 Oct 2020 21:58:35 +0000

I realised if I didn't go back to practising code daily, I'd forget as I did last year.

What better way to get back to it than to commit myself to journaling daily here and doing a 30 days of code challenge. This was super spontaneous because I don't trust myself to start it any other day.

I did Day 1 on Hacker Rank- a simple hello world program. I looked for a random challenge and chickened out--I mean it was expert level and I only got the basics down again during the summer. In the days to come I hope I can follow through with my plan to do a mini-project daily.

I mean, school and my internship can come in the way but I've seen how determined I can be so I'm very hopeful and excited.

I'm not putting any tags on this but if you see this and want to stick around, you're welcome!