Today was hump DaYyYyYY aka solo day. I spent all day on one challenge: lucky AJAX.

I think you’re so cool AJAX

The challenge initially gave us a sinatra skeleton that had a working solution; the index page would display a form button that would display a random dice roll if clicked. However, the page would refresh itself with the new dice roll every time you clicked the submit button. This is very inefficient and this is where AJAX would come in handy! AJAX allows web pages to be updated asynchronously by exchanging small amounts of data with the server behind the scenes. Therefore, instead of refreshing the page everytime I wanted a new, random dice roll, I wanted AJAX to just refresh the image of the dice roll. After spending literally all day about AJAX, I completed the challenge exactly by 6:00PM. And the feeling of accomplishment I got after the completion was glorious! Oh how I love coder’s high!

Compass of shame coming into play

I’m glad that Dev Bootcamp introduced us to the compass of shame during phase_0; you become more self-aware of when your own defense mechanisms are activating. I feel like I am drowning with all the new material these days, and I feel like I’m moving at a much slower pace than the cohort. Therefore, I find myself trying to detach myself from the cohort. This is clearly the north side of the compass: withdrawal. I don’t think that this is a bad thing necessarily because it is only natural to subconsciously / unconsciously want to defend the self. However, when I signed up for Dev Bootcamp, I didn’t sign up to only isolate myself.

So I’ve been fighting with my withdrawal defense mechanisms and trying to push myself back into the group. It’s definitely not easy because I never fought with myself like this before and I definitely feel like I am a victim of Leon Festinger’s theory of cognitive dissonance. However, there is a silver lining to this all; I can prove to myself how strong I can be!