Last night, Kerry mentioned to me that I’m half way through my first week. I don’t think I even realized that! On one hand, the time has flown by. On the other, it’s all blurring together. Has it been 4 days already? A week? It feels like time has no meaning at this point. I get home late, talk to Kerry for 30 minutes or so, go to bed, wake up and do chores or get a quick run in and leave for class.

I am having fun and learning a lot, and I had a vague sense of how intense this would be, but oh man. This is really intense!

Anyway, Kerry left for Southern California for a few days and took Benson with her. I’m on my own! Sorry, cats! (Just kidding. I’ll take care of them.)

This morning we had a lecture on prototype chains which is picks up on the stuff we were learning last night. Afterward, my current coding partner, Erik, and I continued working on our data structure problems and were having some pretty good success!

Side note about Erik: When he first moved to San Francisco a few weeks ago, he was staying with a friend of his… who lives on the 18th floor of my old apartment building at the Carillon Tower. Crazy!

Around mid morning, we’re happily coding when an HIR came over to me to discuss my self-assessment results. Oh, shit!!! I just knew it was going to be about the recursive problem that I completely missed doing.

She wanted me to work through it and make sure I understood how things worked. It’s a pretty fair concern though, they probably want to make sure that I’m not trying to just coast my way through the program. That’s not good for anyone. So, we coded the problem from scratch. Man, it was rough but we ultimately got the correct result after about 30 minutes. I think I understand what was going on but I’ll need to spend some time studying and rewriting things.

Lunch was pretty uneventful. It was mostly used for Target errands and studying.

Anyway, the rest of the day was full of tons of lectures that left little time for coding. We ended the day with a “sprint reflection” which we’ll do roughly once a week. Basically, we give Hack Reactor feedback on what they could be doing better. It’s kind of an interesting way for them to iterate on student suggestions and make rapid improvements. Apparently, a number of previous cohorts have had suggestions that have resulted in some of the experiences we’re currently having.

After 8pm, the day was officially over, but I wanted to spend some extra time working on recursion problems. Boy, did I ever!

From 8pm to 9pm I took it upon myself to again rewrite the self assessment recursion problem to see if I could understand it. It would have been done in 30 minutes if not for some stupid bug (basically, I forgot to return a number. Duuuuuuuuuh.)

Once I finished, I stood up and high fived everyone around me. I was so ridiculously excited! Another student told me that this is basically like a drug – you go through these addictive highs and the crash, so you need to try to work on more problems. Hah.

Beth, the HIR (hacker in residence) who helped me earlier was sitting nearby and saw my excitement, so she asked if I wanted to work on another recursion problem. What the heck, let’s do it!

Go figure, that resulted in me staying until 10pm to work on it. Oh, man. I think I’m really starting to get it, but I just need more practice! I don’t want to shy away from these opportunities to learn and become better – this is what we’re paying for, right?

Anyway, this is the latest night by far: arrived at 8:30AM and left at 10:10PM. Damn. I’m going to regret this in the morning.