It’s about 9pm and I just left Hack Reactor. Today was an outrageously frustrating day that made me feel like I might not be cut out for this. It’s a stupid and over dramatic thing to claim, I know.

Anyway, there’s a lot of unhappiness and negativity in today’s journal.

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I woke up early and worked on my “letter asteroids” game for a bit and ended up showing a number of people this morning before classes started. People were getting an absolute kick out of it and it was great seeing the reactions. Tons of people had suggestions and wanted to see me take it further. Awesome!

We worked on a toy problem to attempt to calculate the nth element of a Fibonacci sequence. I completely screwed it up and spent 45 minutes just spinning my wheels and doing absolutely nothing. So, that was great.

Then we had our standard sprint reflection for a bit before we broke for our mid-morning lecture for our new sprint. This was going to be focused on a data visualization package called D3. I’ve been really excited about learning more about this library for a long time and have considered this sort of thing to be one of my strong suites.

The objective for this sprint was to build a simple game using D3 to show how powerful it was and other ways it could be used. (Hey! Another game, alright)

Basically, we were going to be re-implementing a game that was written in another programming language and we’d be able to reference these documents whenever we needed. Alright, seems easy enough. That’ll leave some time to really have fun with this package!

Hahahaha.

Today, we switched up to new partners. Someone I hadn’t worked with with yet wanted to pair with me and I said sure. He’s been pretty interesting to talk to in the past and he’s one of the few I met from the meet up prior to school starting.

So, I think I said this yesterday, but I distinctly remember one of the things our lecturers said during the first week was how pair programming was going to make us better communicators. And they also had a warning that if you are someone who has a problem with a lot of other people, maybe the problem isn’t them, but it isn’t you.

Between the last few days and today, I’m starting to think the problem is me. I mean, I don’t think it is! But things just went wrong from the start. We came back from lunch and sat down to get to work and it turns out he hadn’t even read the intro docs yet (which by the way, we had 45 minutes set aside BEFORE lunch for this specific purpose).

So he wanted to do that before we began. Sure, sure! Then we started trying to implement the game — he was driver since he was less experienced and comfortable in D3 and I would navigate. But he second guessed every decision I would make and strongly suggested that I not look at the source code for the previous game (again, written in another language, mind you!).

The API documentation for D3 is about 2,000 pages. There is no way we’re re-implementing this stupid cheesy game from scratch without some sort of documentation or reference material. I said as much, but he wanted to really dig in and reverse engineer a bunch of complexity from scratch. One of the things our lecturers really stress is that we should avoid unnecessary complexity. I was going to try and help him walk through it but it wasn’t going well.

On top of that, he grabbed one of our whiteboards and started to write a list of words we should not say to each other! Stuff like:

• I think
• I feel
• basically
• actually
• we should
• actually
• like

And he continued to update it whenever he heard a new word that he didn’t like either of us using. Great! I quipped that if he kept this up we wouldn’t be able to talk to each other.

Anyway, we continued struggle a bunch before dinner and I think people around us were picking up on our frustrations and realizing that we needed to clear our heads. A fellow student was sitting at the workstation next to us and asked me, “umm, want to get out of here for a bit and grab dinner?”

I ended up inviting my partner as well since he had no where to go. We had a pretty good chat about what was working and what wasn’t working and it was kind of nice to have a third person there to break the tension.

So, dinner was great! We returned to our workstations with renewed vigor and a sense of purpose.

And pretty quickly ran into the same problems again and again. Arrrrggggghhhhh.

On top of this, an HIR wanted to talk to me about Monday’s self-assessment test, which I had thought I’d done pretty well on. We sat down and he pulled up one of my problems and said, “I’ll be honest. I have absolutely zero idea what you were trying to do here.”

So, we went through this problem and 2 others, rewriting my code line by line. It was definitely helpful but I was a bit flustered from the day’s events and struggled my way through it. It’s stuff like this that fosters imposter syndrome and makes me wonder if I’m in over my head.

Toward the end of the night, I finally suggested that we should scrap everything we have, start over from scratch and reference the provided source code (since everyone else was doing that, too). My partner replies “Dave, I really don’t appreciate your negativity right now.”

…

I’m assuming a staff member heard us because a few minutes later Marcus, one of the cofounders (and a lecturer) came over to us and asked if everything was okay.

He has the patience of a saint. I felt like my partner was getting bogged down in the complexity of how the library worked and Marcus spent the next hour and 15 minutes explaining to both of us how this sort of stuff worked but why it was important that libraries abstract this stuff away from us. It was great spending one on one time with Marcus but frustrating to realize what sorts of things were blocking us from being able to move forward.

Ultimately, we accomplished approximately zero things today. I finally left “early” at 9pm because I couldn’t take it anymore.

Maybe a night of solid sleep will help. Reset, reboot, and head in tomorrow with a better attitude.