I really started to hit a wall today in terms of energy level. I think Sunday gives a lot of time to cooperate, but by midweek we’ve run out of adrenaline and energy. From lunch time until I left at 9:40PM, I could barely keep my eyes open. I imagine most of my fellow students feel the same way. Nearly the whole class went home by 8:30PM.

But more on that later.

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We started off the day with a toy problem called “IsSubsetOf?” Basically, you’re given an array that looks something like ['dave','kerry'] and you want to find out if it’s a subset of another array that contains ['dave','kerry','benson','tegan','tosh']. Which it is! You’re looking to see if all those elements are contained within another array.

I ended up finishing the problem with about 4 lines of code and it took me 10 minutes at most. It was deceivingly easy. Too easy. I kept looking over things to make sure I wasn’t missing anything. Finally I submitted it and ended up getting 8 out of 8 points from Taser. Awesome!!

The entire rest of the day was spent on our sun class sprint. So many people in the class were building actual games that would take user input, move elements around the screen, and react to user input and other elements. It was amazing.

Today’s student presentation was given by this sharp kid about how he wrote a way tracing app in JavaScript. I’ve talked to him a few times and have always been struck by his intelligence. He’s really young! We were chatting about where we grew up and he mentioned he moved away from the Bay Area when he was 10 years old.

“So, that was around 2005 I think.”

Hooooly crap. Believe it or not, there is also a 15 year old kid going through the program in the other cohort right now. Insane!

Anyway, we wrapped things up and went back to our desks. There was a lot of laughter and people were having fun showing their projects to each other.

Meanwhile, my partner and I had completed our “Sharknado” and he was searching for how many Jean Claude Van Damm images we could put on one page before it caused epilepsy and wouldn’t let us move on to adding interesting feature simply because a few images kept moving outside the bounds of our page.

One of our fellow classmates came over, laughed and remarked that it looked like a Geocities page from the early 1990’s.

Yea, no kidding. So, that was fun.

When we were finally able to move on, we had trouble trying to implement some features like detecting basic user input and both him and I were getting frustrated. Plus, we were all so exhausted too. It was hard to think!

It got to the point where he asked me what else we should add and I told him “nothing!” I was just done with this project. I don’t think he was that thrilled but if we couldn’t stop getting hung up on making everything perfect from the moment we add it, there was no point working on more stuff for our “Geocities” page.

The day wrapped up and him and most of the class called it at around 8PM. Despite being exhausted, I stayed and worked on a brand new project using some of the things we learned (or were supposed to learn) over the last two days.

After seeing all these other people create actual simple games, I wanted to try doing that too. So, from 8PM to around 9:45PM, I was furiously trying to my own game. And you know what? I have a pretty decent start!

Basically, think of the old video game “Asteroids”, where a player controls a spaceship on screen and has to dodge incoming asteroids. I decided to do that but with letters. The player is assigned a letter (e.g., “A”) and has to dodge letters that randomly appear and float down the screen. However, if they see their own letter appear, they need to capture it by running into it.

In about 2 hours I got most of that working on my own! Letters randomly appear, the player can move around their own letter, it’s awesome! Still need to add collision detection and scores but that shouldn’t be too bad at this point!

It was awesome to see that come together so quickly and I feel like I salvaged an otherwise wasted day! By the time I left for the night, I was one of 3 students still there.