Reading other blog posts for this week, it seems clear that most people benefitted a great deal from working in pairs. While, like others, Courtney and I were pretty lost at first, I like to think that we made at least a little bit of headway into “bouncing balls.” Of course, much of our time together last week saw us both blankly staring at the screen. In rare moments of clarity, though, both she and I would manage a coding suggestion. While nothing we did worked, I like to think of the experience as kind of a “coding by process of elimination.” If we throw everything at the wall, sooner or later, something is bound to stick, right? Hm. Maybe I should ask Nathaniel for some advice on this… (you know–‘cause you wrote that program with the shit, get it?)

At any rate, I met with Aden to work on it on Friday. We were both hoping that David, in his infinite wisdom, would stop in the computer lab but, unfortunately (for him, too), he’s been under the weather.

Luckily, Joe was in his office for us to interrupt incessantly. We ultimately, with Joe’s magnanimous help, got the balls to work. Well, Aiden did. Mine kept freezing. It seems that that wasn’t a problem with the code, though. Scott suggested that it sounded more like a bug.

Just as well. I wanted to go through the code line by line to try to figure out what each line was doing and why. I went through it and commented on every line, noting what I did and didn’t understand as well as noting questions I had, e.g. what the fuck is ‘magnitude’? At the open coding session on Monday, Scott sat down with me and we went through it together and he answered my questions.

Since I wasn’t going to be in class on 3/3, Scott improvised the lesson and went over it with Adina and me. It was a huge help. Like Nathaniel, I had mostly been trying to power through the code but then, on Monday, I finally got into my head that pseudocoding is a fantastic tool! I don’t know why I was so dismissive before! I suspect I just thought that, bottom line, I need to learn this stuff, and fast – so I didn’t want to take the time that, turns out, is really, really (at least for me) necessary in order to learn it right.

Like Noah, I’ve been unusually overwhelmed with other things since Monday. I think I’ll have some time over the weekend to work on this timer so, fair warning, several of you may be getting frantic, desperate emails from me…