Technical Blog 4

My brain might be fried but I'm too stubborn to realise

Getting blocked on a simple problem

Rephrase the question please. When WASN'T I blocked on a #simple problem. I feel like learning to code is a bit like lighting a fire in a cave where the fire is your knowledge of coding and the cave is what you still need to learn. You work really hard on adding kindling to the fire to stoke it up, and eventually over time it starts to get a little bigger. The only problem being that the brighter your fire gets the more you you can see how massive the cave is.

One problem in particular I was getting stuck on was in the gradebook challenge where I needed to average an array. I knew how to do the maths but I was really struggling with how to put it into practice.

Solving a problem in an elegant way

Queue .reduce(). Can I get a hallelujah?? This little bugger gave me one of those eurika moments when you have to jump up from your desk and have a little boogie. And I must say I've had quite a few of those moments while working on javaScript. Yeah my neighbours may not appreciate the "awww heeeell yeah's" that come bursting out of my window at 11.30 at night but hey, gotta celebrate your successes right :)?

My feelings when confronted with a problem

In a word, volatile. I'm not sure why but sometimes I'm totally cool with being confronted with a problem while other times I find myself getting frustrated. "That code I've written makes sense, I can talk through it, it's logical, why aren't you working!?!?". 3 hours later.... "WHO PUT THAT SEMICOLON AT THE END OF THAT OBJECT VALUE!?".

Spoiler alert: I did.

Problem solving techniques

• Pseudocode - Definitely improving. At first I'd just throw myself at a problem, get halfway through, then quickly realise that I had no real action plan and end up getting lost in my own code.
• Trying something - The only times I'm afraid to try something out is when I'm afraid I'll jeopardize my existing code. I'm quickly finding out that if that's a concern I'm already too far gone.
• Rubber ducky method - Love it. Have a sticker on order that I'll be chucking on the back of my laptop so I can spin my laptop round when I'm struggling and spend some 1 on 1 time with my ducky 'ol pal.
• Reading error messages - I'm good until I see 'undefined', then I loose all hope. Getting better though.
• Console.logging - Something that I've definitely gotten better at doing. I am now progressively console.logging as I work through a problem. Super helpful tool.
• Googling - Amazing, couldn't live without it. MDN is also a fantastic tool than I now use a lot.
• Asking your peers for help - Something that I could be doing more of. That set of fresh eyes could no doubt come in handy a lot of the time. If you're reading this and you're in the same boat drop me a message, I want to work with you.
• Asking coaches for help - I think Kelly's getting pretty used to late night messages from me! Thanks for all yur help Kelly!
• Improving your process with reflection - If this isn't immediately obvious from reading my last blog entry I'm becoming a lot more informal with my blog entries which I'm finding to be helpful. I still don't relish taking a break from studying to write my reflections however, I am finding that it's a good opportunity to consolidate what I've learned throughout the sprint.