I was prepared for today. I slept at 10:00PM last night, making sure I got enough rest. This is because this week’s challenges were on topics that I am not that strong in: Javascript, JQuery, and AJAX.

This morning was spent finishing up the final touches to the project my group and I have been working on since Friday. We added minor CSS details, changed from front end interactions with the user, and deployed it to heroku here. Some of the things that I took from this project:

• Git workflow is something that shouldn’t be ignored. I would say it is just as important as coding, if not more.
• Communication is VITAL in team projects. I am embarrassed to say that at a certain point in time on Saturday, I started to get confused with what parts of the project were done and which parts of the project still needed to be worked on.
• NEVER push to master! Fortunately I was merge master for this project so this wasn’t much of a problem for me, but when project members accidentally push to master, this created serious merge conflicts with other members’ code when attempting to merge pull requests.
• You have to assume that members will never pull the most recent changes from master. Therefore, remind them every 3 minutes until you receive confirmation.
• You can’t trust commit messages to describe what was committed.

After presentations were finished, I eagerly partnered up to start with the challenges for today…only to feel utterly defeated by them. I was unable to comprehend what in the world I was supposed to do. The challenge was ‘Javascript Racer’, where we create two cars that race each other from one side of the screen to the other. Therefore, I quickly forfeited the challenge, apologized to my partner that I cannot contribute anything to the completion of the challenge, and started tutorials on Javascript. However, the feeling I got from reviewing Javascript now as supposed to phase_0 was completely different. I seem to understand the foundations much more with object-oriented programming. Hopefully I will be able to grasp the material soon enough!

Sink or Swim?

I am a little disappointed in myself because of the lack of motivation I had this past weekend; I was very scared that my motivation was dwindling because of how much I’m struggling. I feel like I’m not struggling anymore to stay afloat. I feel like I am fully submerged in the water, unable to resurface. In the past, whenever I felt like I started to struggle, I would quickly detach myself from the source of the problem to diminish the stress that would come with it. However, I want this. I want to become better. I want to be the best. I want to contribute and give back to the hacker community. This is the first time in my life where I decided that I wouldn’t run anyway. I will flail my arms as hard as I can, as much as I can, until I come back onto the surface. However, words are…just words. Hopefully I’ll be able to turn these words into a reality through my actions.