After getting home and going to bed last night, I woke up about 4 or 5 times throughout the night after dreaming of various whiteboard problems. It felt like my mind had an actual electric current going through it and it was just buzzing with nonstop activity. Needless to say, I’ve been absolutely wiped out today. This explains why it’s 8:15pm and I’m heading home on BART. The sun is still literally above the horizon right now. (Interestingly, I didn’t meditate last night, so it might be a good experiment for tonight.)

After taking BART to school this morning, there was a crazy bum on the sidewalk yelling. I accidentally made eye contact with him, so he helpfully walked me to school.

And by helpfully, I mean yelling things right into my face while waking next to me. “DO YOU KNOW WHY I DON’T LIKE YOU. DO YOU KNOW? DO YOU?! I’VE HATED YOU EVER SINCE I MET YOU.“

He left me alone once I got in the building. The security guard in the lobby shook his head and said “welcome to my life every morning.” Anyway, it was an interesting way to start the morning. I never really felt threatened, just felt sorry for him.

Anyway, school was good.

We did our usual assortment of toy problems. This time, we had to find common characters between two different strings and return them. For example, you’re given ‘aeiou’ and ‘abcde’, the test would expect to get back a string containing ‘ae’.

I didn’t do it in the most efficient way but I did it! I finished with some extra time so I tried to refactor my code to use a more efficient method and ran out of time.

I feel like I’m getting to the point where I have the tools at my disposal to solve any of these problems, I just don’t know the most efficient way to do it yet. But I’m really trying to think about it more!

My partner and I continued to work on our current sprint and finished up adding a few “nice to have” features to our chat client before lunch.

One thing we encountered whenever we look things up online (this happens a lot to all of us and Hack Reactor actively encourages us to solve problems on our own this way) is that there is a universally hated site that pops up to the top of the search results for nearly any web development problem. It’s called W3Schools and has amazing Google ranking for some reason, even though their answers leave a lot to be desired. It’s really just an ad network.

Anyway, they are so derided that people at school generally call others out when they see them on this site. So, we made a little bet.

Each time one of us clicked a link to W3Schools, that person would owe the other partner a beer. So, we started keeping track on a whiteboard. I ended us losing the day and owe him a single beer.

Myself and another classmate (who was my coding partner a week ago), walked down to the Ferry Building for lunch. On Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday we have a two hour long lunch which is provided so that people can exercise or work out. It’s a nice way to get out and enjoy the day.

After lunch, we decided to split up for a bit so we could do some solo studying on the Backbone.js library. Our instructors strongly suggested that we try and complete the extra credit for our current sprint by converting it to use Backbone.

Holy crap, what a beast of a process. It’s probably because I don’t really understand much about something called the “Model-View-Controller” architecture right now. But it was some crazy hard shit!

We watched the solution video to this sprint (which included converting the project to Backbone.js) and we still didn’t understand it. We tried our best anyway but didn’t finish.

That said, even when things weren’t going well or we weren’t understanding some concept, we were never frustrated with each other and always having a great time. It was awesome!

Dinner was pretty uneventful and the student presentation was given by a friendly fellow who is visiting from Florida. His talk was about planning for retirement and “how to manage the piles of dollars we’re all going to get once we graduate.”

The rest of the evening was spent messing around and trying to get stuff to work with Backbone. We didn’t get very far (nor did many other people). Tomorrow is going to be interesting!

Looking forward to eating some sleep tonight though. I’m ready.