Triple Dead End
Daily Standup
September 17, 2017
I hit a wall in all three of the things I’m working on right now. It’s been frustrating but I kind of have a path forward, at least for one of them.
CS50 Dead End
I know I say this with every assignment, but today I started on the latest assignment and literally had no idea where to begin. We are building a spellchecker in C and are given a “dictionary” (i.e. a list of 143,000 words) as well as a long text to spellcheck. We have to write a program which reads the dictionary and stores all of the words into memory using one of the data structures we learned about in the lecture (hash table, tries, etc.); then using that dictionary, we have to spell check the text. And these actions are being timed–we need to write the program to do all of this as quickly as possible.
I got as far as writing to code to open & read the dictionary…and got totally stuck at writing a function for a hash table or a trie. That was pretty frustrating and I just didn’t have it in me to power through today. If I weren’t so stubborn about finishing the course, today would have been the day I’d give up!
Metro App Dead End
I also picked up the Coding For Product project again to try and get it to be a bit more presentable. Although we got it working for our final presentation at the end of the workshop, there were still a few important bits & bobs we didn’t have time to implement before, which really should be addressed if it’s going to be a good example of code to reference or talk about.
The first thing I wanted to work on was getting the login sessions to persist which I finally did do over the last three days, but in doing so, I somehow made it so that 2 login attempts are required before you can get into the app. I don’t know what I’m missing and it’s frustrating, after spending hours staring at the same brick wall.
I braved StackOverflow to try & get some help but haven’t gotten any responses yet. I will try some Slack groups or maybe a meetup this week if I can’t work it out. But for today, I’d had enough.
Value App Dead End
I also spent several hours working on my Value App trying to access nested, referenced data inside a MongoDB collection. When I build the model, I followed along from another project where I was able to do the exact same thing successfully, but in this project for some reason it’s not working. I think it’s something to do with accessing objects vs. arrays, and how to call them using Mongoose. Anyway lots of trial & error, YouTubing, StackOverflowing and I couldn’t figure it out.
So at least with this one I’ve determined something I could do now. I enrolled in a (yet another) Udemy course specifically focused on MongoDB and Mongoose which I’m hoping will help me build the app. Actually I think it really will, because my only experience so far is doing CRUD commands with things like blog posts or comments, but my app will be a little bit more involved and truth be told, I wouldn’t know where to start on some of the features once I get past these schema design issues.
Is it bad/procrastination/the easy route/overloading my workload to add another course into the mix right now? Probably. But I don’t know where to get the kind of help I need, and I’m tired of getting nothing done!
I’ve only just started but I think it will be good as the course uses ES6, which I don’t have much practice in but want (need) to learn, and it definitely looks like we’ll be covering all of the skills I need to build my app. So here’s going for the best!
Other Stuff
I’m re-listening to the book Grit by Angela Duckworth and this time taking notes before I return it to the library. It’s a good book with some good advice to remember! I also picked up the Elon Musk biography (on sale today on Amazon) and am looking forward to reading about his backstory.
Up Next
Speeding through the Mongo class so I’m not too delayed on completing an MVP for my value app. I also don’t want to let CS50 build up as too hard in my head so will jump back into the spellchecker assignment asap.