I thought yesterday was a bit frustrating and hard. That was nothing compared to today. Today was excruciatingly difficult! The amazing thing is that it went from shaking my confidence to my core to leaving with a feeling of exhilaration and renewed sense of understanding.

We started off with our first self-assessment. These are basically timed tests that feature a handful of problems you need to solve (in this case, you’re basically writing some helper functions) and test yourself. Once you’re happy and confident in your results, you push it to Github and submit a pull request on the main Hack Reactor repo. A helpful robot runs your code against its own internal test suite and gives you some basic results.

I did bad. Like real bad. There were 35 possible points and I got 18. One of the reasons is that I just didn’t pay attention to how many problems there were. So, I mostly finished 4 of them, thought I had extra time and went back to clean them up.

When the warning bell sounded to let us know we needed to turn in our tests, I loaded up the Readme file and copied all the grading criteria for each problem (which we submit as a comment on our pull request). That’s when I noticed there were 5 problems.

Oh, shit.

I quickly added some “pseudo code”, basically a bunch of comments in the code about what I would do if I actually had time.

Fortunately, it sounds like a lot of others were in the same boat. Man, oh man. Welcome to Hack Reactor.

Our mid morning lecture consisted of coding best practices and then a very basic intro to data structures. We were turned loose to attempt some problems before lunch.

Telling people about food trucks has turned me into a popular guy! There were about 11 people waiting to leave with me at lunch. It was pretty fun and I got to know some of my fellow classmates a bit better.

Afterward, we had more lectures, this time that focused on debugging tools. We were them split into pairs based on our knowledge of 10 questions related to data structures (I only knew 2 of the 10 answers). So my partner and I were relatively new to this whole coding thing.

From the moment we dived in, it was a disaster. Not between us, though! We were just in over our heads trying to solve some of these new problems! We talked ourselves in circles and couldn’t get any of our tests to pass. We kind of just spun out wheels for an hour and a half.

We went to dinner and were just totally demoralized. He went somewhere to focus on some of the solo modules that were assigned to us, while I started looking up resources that could better explain some of the things I was having difficulty with. After an hour or so, I felt like I was understanding things better. It also helped that a Hacker in Residence sat down with me to explain things.

When my partner came back, he seemed refreshed and was ready to dive back into things with both of our newfound knowledge. Things just clicked and it’s like we really started to understand things. It was awesome!

We even took the time to go back and rewrite one of the solutions that was giving us so much trouble. It’s kind of crazy to think about how low we were feeling earlier in the day and how high we ended up.