After struggling through another day and hitting a down turn in motivation I found myself re-evaluating my approach. Am I going about this correctly? I feel Like I’m not moving forward or am? All these questions have led me to change my approach. Moving forward I will be focusing on exposure with dabbling’s in experimentation. This is in contrast to my current detail focused approached.
TLDR;
Okay, so here are the highlights of what I did:
- Finished my second read through of chapter 11 of “Eloquent JavaScript” by Marijn Haverbeke. I am honestly burnt out. I need to do something fresh.
My Approach Moving Forward
This round and the previous one, I have been trying to learn a lot of new things. I was getting bogged down initially but eventually the details and background work helped me in better understanding the topic. However now it seems that’s not the case. I am giving myself all these side missions to complete but I’m not really moving forward. It feels like I am walking through knee deep mud. I’m getting tired and disinterested. If I don’t address this problem I will end up stopping and falling off from my daily studying streak.
I came to the decision that although I like understanding black boxes sometimes I have to accept my lack of understanding for the moment to allow myself the chance to keep moving forward. I can always circle back and address the topic. I came to this decision after talking through an article I was reading on JavaScript Promises. I understood how promises worked but the chapter on the topic was dry and involved many other concepts that I was not familiar with. I wanted to understand what was going on before moving forward but this lead to me dragging on.
Long story short, I need to follow the path of least resistance while making notes of what I can circle back to. It’s like playing through a game again to complete all the side quests. I can’t stress over combing through every nook and cranny on the map before moving on to the next level. I need to manage that. I can do some side quests but not all of them at once. I need to mix in some side quests with some main quests to keep things balanced.
So I will be dropping the “Pretty Print Function” for now and move to learning about “Tries” and “Graph” Data structures. I will also be moving forward with chapter 12 of the JavaScript Book. When I read now though I will try to focus on the core points and writes notes on what topics I would like to cover more when I come back to the topic or if I see it again.
Goal For Round 6 of the #100DaysofCode Challenge
This is my sixth round of the “#100daysofcode” challenge. I will be continuing my work from round five into round six. I am currently working through the book “Cracking the Coding Interview” by Gayle Laakmann McDowell. My goal is to become more familiar with algorithms and data structures. This goal was derived from my goal to better understand operating systems and key programs that I use in the terminal regularly e.g. Git. This goal was in term derived from my desire to better understand the fundamental tools used for coding outside of popular GUIs. This in turn was derived from my desire to be a better back-end developer.
I have no idea if my path is correct but I am walking down this road anyways. Worst case scenario I learn a whole bunch of stuff that will help me out on my own personal projects.