It is getting harder and harder to find time to write. Constant challenges, new material, watching and re-watching videos while reading and re-reading tutorials, trying to keep up with solo challenges while also putting in some time on my Phase 2 final project. Somewhere in there I need to remember to eat and sleep, which frustrates me because it takes away from coding time.

Today ended up being more frustrating than I thought it would be. I knew there was a lot of work left to do on our Connect Four group project, but I thought we’d be able to burn through it and have something to show off at the end of the day. I couldn’t have been further from the truth. Here’s how it went:

The morning started with Friday check-in. The Phase 1 folks had a theme of feeling like they weren’t being challenged enough, which I can definitely understand. Phase 1 week 1 was pretty easy, mostly just reintroducing ideas. Most of Phase 1 was like that, with some new techniques for old concepts being added in to hone our skills. My biggest complaint from the last week was about not being given enough challenges pertaining to the new skills we learned. AJAX is still incredibly foreign to me, and I know I won’t fully understand it until I can run through 20 or so examples.

We skipped the morning lecture in order to spend more time on projects, so my pair and I got right to work. I wanted him to fully drive today, since I’ve been taking control too much during this project, but his driving didn’t last long. We chatted about what we wanted to work on first, and since I already had a direction I wanted to go, He insisted that I code it while I was thinking about it. Throughout the day, we switched places occasionally, but I ended up writing a large amount of it.

In the end, it didn’t really matter, because no matter how hard we pushed, we weren’t able to get the final product working to the point that I was willing to share it with the team. On the back-end, we could select a column and make the board attempt to fill that column’s bottom cell with a piece. If it couldn’t, it would try the next cell above, and keep trying until it either placed a piece or had no cells left. The game could also switch players after a piece was successfully placed, and a winner was found if there were four of one kind in a row. We only had it working for columns and rows, not diagonals, before we ran out of time. On the front-end team, they managed to make a column click fill in a cell, but needed our code for the logic of which cell to fill in. We tried for quite a while, but never managed to make it fully work. We were the only ones not to present, which was really frustrating and embarrassing, especially because I felt like we had worked really hard on it.

At 6, I went right back to work on my Phase 2 final project. I got the routes mostly made, and was able to put in quite a bit of functionality for creating a profile, logging in, and creating a quiz. This weekend is going to be a big push for me, because I want to have a fully functioning prototype by Monday. That way, I can focus on the week’s challenges and the easier solo challenges without the final project looming over me.

Until Monday, I’m Edwin Unger and I’m a web developer in training.