This week was a rougher one for me, though I find solace in knowing the difficulty came from the context of the week and not the content.
I hadn’t had too much exposure to algorithms before this week (in undergrad I dropped out of Comp Sci 2: Algorithms a week into classes). I also feel like I wouldn’t have appreciated it as much back then and can picture myself quickly getting frustrated and giving up on the concepts. Now though, I’ve had more experience with coding and I no longer feel like Math is an antagonistic force in my life.
I spent Monday just learning about as many different algorithms I could find, while I had some idea how vast the concept was, it was incredibly interesting to actually learn about all the different applications and variations. I especially had a good time learning about the less effective, satirical, and incomprehensible ones. Some favorites from those categories include Gnome Sort, Miracle Sort, and TREE(3), respectively.
I was ready to jump into animations, but decided to take up the work from home offer on Tuesday due to the heat wave. As if the suffocating heat itself wasn’t enough to impede my progress, being at home makes me vulnerable to distractions both practical and not. It was a slow day of little coding, but if I had one victory that day it was that I realized my biggest blocker was not having a good picture of what I wanted my site’s layout to look like. Solving this also made me get more familiar with Figma which I was happy to start using since I’ve been increasingly inclined towards the front-end of web dev.
I was able to bring a basic version of my vision to life over then next day, but Thursday I came to a complete halt when my computer wouldn’t start up and the earliest repair appointment I could get was at 6pm. I won’t lie, I was feeling very defeated and frustrated, especially because I just had to fix my laptop’s screen little more than a week ago. The silver lining was that it was rebooted at the store and I didn’t need to actually pay for another repair.
With a whole day basically gone (I still did a bit of coding on Miah’s laptop), I wanted to spend the rest of my week deeper in the problem solving side of things. The animation work would be a bit much to return to right away and so I focused on the 2024 Advent of Code challenges which Eric had graciously shared a link to in the discord. And I'm thankful for it because focusing on solving those smaller problems made me feel like I was still capable of programming. It reminded me how far I’ve come in the last few weeks and that I can be patient with myself in solving a challenging problem.
Sometimes you need those small wins.