This is the first week that I’ve been caught up with dailies (with considerable help from others). The coding lesson last week was going okay, but then I couldn’t see something on the screen, fell behind, and then was completely lost. On Friday I met Aden in the lab in Maccabees to work on “Keyed Up.” Instead of entering the code as we went along in class, his strategy was to write the code in his notebook and then to transcribe it to Atom later. So, between us, we thought we’d do okay. Except that the code didn’t work.

Then David came in. After looking at what we had, he couldn’t identify the problem. I emailed Diana to see if she would send us her code for comparison and she did. We compared the two and couldn’t find any differences, until David noticed that our lower case v in “vector” was supposed to be capitalized.

This incident is representative of what irritates/frustrates/scares the hell out of me about writing code. It’s so easy to fuck shit up! And, as many of you can attest, I fuck shit up pretty often. I feel like I’m getting better though – or at least more comfortable. At open coding on Monday I worked on finishing the last of the last group of dailies, creating a “sketch that animates a lot of somethings that aren’t Bubbles or Balls.” I altered and tested just about every element in the source code, and I actually learned a lot about how the “Bubbles” code works. So, while I’m pretty confident that, after this class, I’ll likely not write another line of code for as long as I live, at least there’s progress for now.

I’m actually looking forward to open coding tomorrow. I’m fairly confident that I can make a bunch of translucent, bouncing balls. Not so sure about using vectors, though. Sounds like math. I don’t math well.