Descent into Hell
To say this week was a sluggish and unproductive one would be an understatement. Without mincing my words, thoughts and feelings, this week has felt the most difficult, most challenging and most unmotivating. The week has been in stark contrast to the week before but also a good learning curve in that not everything will go your way and its about how you dust yourself off and carry on rather than when you fall, and you will fall a lot, especially when learning new concepts or languages. Planning and diagramming is a particular weakness of mine and it was badly exposed this week, as a lack of clear plan and method of execution left me and my group drifting aimlessly in the sea.
As there wasn’t much of a guide this week to help us along compared to previously, we ended up spending a good portion of the time talking as a group without much of an agreement on how to proceed. This cost us valuable time and had to rely on coaches guidance to provide us with a bit of direction. Bless the coaches at Makers they had a lot of time and patience for us to make sure we understood the plan and to get our thinking caps on. An oversight on my part was not fully understanding some of the functionality and how it was going to work overall. Youtube along with documentation were super helpful for filling in the knowledge gaps this week.
This week’s project was to create our own testing framework along with a single page notes app using vanilla javascript. Vanilla javascript is as it sounds the default; the boring language without any 3rd party libraries. The idea was for us to understand those libraries are just other coders writing code that you yourself could also create and export as a library to others one day. This all sounds very cool, it helped demystify the assumption that there was any real magic going on behind testing frameworks or library’s like jQuery that were doing all these amazing fancy things.
Even the thought of creating our own testing framework sounded extremely daunting early on, and while I only managed to write a few of the tests for our app, I would feel more confident writing a few more if required. As previously stated it was an extremely tough week for our group as we lacked direction and knowledge in how to get started. This is something that will likely happen a lot but it’s good to be familiar with this sense of frustration when the entire team seemed out of ideas. Being familiar with the unknown is the only way we can grow as people, being stuck and experiencing difficulty as we did shows learning. Its important to reflect on these times to really understand why and where we can improve. At the end I felt defeated, disappointed with my learning I achieved this week, but not wallowing in misery as I know I tried really hard. Not everything will always go exactly as you want it or planned for it to be but trying your best is all anyone can ask of you. I just know I will need to spend additional time on it to get myself up to speed but not beat myself over the head with it as I know I have come a long way in a short space of time.
I am disheartened but I know I need to focus a bit more and I will be okay, I have the expectations that I have of myself and while I have fallen short this week I know nobody has died, in the grand scheme of things this will just be a bump in the road of what will be a long and fulfilling career in this industry.
On the plus side I am hopeful that a bad times have passed and I can hopefully have a more productive and fruitful week coming up!
