So, I got home last night and tried meditating thanks to a suggestion from Kerry and one of our neighbors. Basically, it’s been hard for me to fall asleep because I bike a mile from the BART station late at night on my way home, which gets my heart racing. On top of that, my mind is still so wrapped up from the events of each day that it just races like crazy.

So, I downloaded an app and tried it out and I think it really helped. It’s weird and crazy and strange, but I dunno. It was kind of nice to try and force your mind to not think about anything for 10 minutes or so.

Anyway, I woke up this morning and started to re-implement the project we were supposed to work on yesterday on my own. I made some pretty significant progress before I had to leave the house and head to school (wait, is it Saturday?? Oh man, it’s Saturday).

Today’s toy problem was a bubble sort. It’s one of the most basic concepts of computer science and we had to come up with a way to implement it from scratch. This means you’re given an array that looks like [5,1,3,4,2] and have to come up with a way to return [1,2,3,4,5].

It wasn’t too difficult though I don’t think I solved it in the most efficient way. I feel like I can work on that sort of thing later when I have more fundamentals down. Right now, at least I can solve the problem.

After that, it was pair time. I showed my partner the progress I made and he seemed impressed. So, he begrudgingly agreed to let us try modifying our existing code from my own source code. So we did! Mostly. But then we got stuck on stupid stuff and went to get help from an HIR who basically said “you guys really need to ignore this complexity. I know you talked to Marcus last night but that guy it a genius and probably explained things in excruciating detail. You don’t need to know any of that!”

No kidding. I’ve felt pretty comfortable not totally understanding how certain things work when it comes to these third party libraries and I think that’s important. I get the curiosity, but we don’t have the time to get hung up on it. The HIR left us with some more advice, “use whatever resources you have available to you to implement the code and then start trying to understand it once you compete your basic requirements.”

At this point, my partner gets bummed out and sad and I basically had to drag him through my code to get stuff implemented. Right before lunch, we FINALLY got about 75% of the basic requirements implemented. I told him to stand up and then gave him a hug. A bunch of people laughed, we all high fived, it was good.

It was still frustrating but I tried to have a much more positive attitude about things today. I think going into the day with that mindset is huge.

Before lunch, there was a final piece of the basic requirements to implement and we were having a lot of trouble getting things to work. I suggested that we should just look at someone else’s code to get an idea of what was going on. My partner was almost incredulous, “wait, do you mean another Hack Reactor student?!?”

Errr, yes.

Lunch came around and he took off. I walked over to some of our neighbors and asked what they did to get this feature working (basically how to get our web app to respond to mouse input and actually drag and drop elements around the webpage.)

The answers were amazing. “To be honest, I have zero idea how to do it. I just copied someone else’s code and it worked.”

“Oh! The drag and drop code? I just found this example and copied it.”

“Oh, hahaha. That thing? I copied the code from our neighbor. It just works.”

So, I did just that and went to lunch. We got back from lunch and I showed him the updated code. “Look at this crazy thing. It works! Amazing!!!”

That did it. We finished the basic requirements. Since it’s Saturday, the official learning portion of the class ends at 5:30 (before our weekly social night kicks off). So, at that point we had a few hours left. I ended up watching the solution lecture videos that Hack Reactor provides after each sprint and then worked on some algorithm problems.

After that, social night officially kicked off at 6:30. The theme this week was karaoke night. So, a bunch of us went down to the 7th floor lecture hall, had a few beers and sang the night away.