Did you feel these past few weeks like you were hit on the head with “a small body of matter from outer space that enters the earth’s atmosphere, becoming incandescent as a result of friction and appearing as a streak of light”?
The quote above came from an assignment for a class that I am taking. In this class, we are using a whole bunch of applications that are tied together under an application called, “Meteor”. Because of the sheer number of programs we are using as well as the vast number of pages that we are working with inside of the Meteor environment, it is feeling more like a meteor shower (hitting me in the head causing friction). Thankfully, the pain from all the hits makes one ambivalent to the lack of sleep I have been having over the last few weeks.
Unfortunately, I have still not been able to go back and revisit some of the previous learning. In particular, I am having significant trouble working with handlebars/mustache. Because we are attempting to use this particular language, we are being forced to learn how to write “if statements” and loops in different ways. I had previously hoped to have had time to go back spend more time learning this concept, but sadly, I have not had the time and it is coming back to haunt me. (I guess Halloween is just around the corner!) Thankfully, I think that I should have a little bit of time next week. (Hmmm, Thanksgiving follows Halloween…)
To complicate matters further, we have added a bunch of form-controls to add various text fields, buttons, checkboxes and such to our webpages. While we have been provided with much of the coding to add in these features, having not been confident enough with my knowledge of JavaScript, it has been difficult placing the given code into the correct place and using the correct syntax to get everything to work properly. In fact, truth be told, many times I can narrow the placement and syntax to a few smaller choices and then I resort to brute force to find where the final placement and syntax should be.
On the positive side, I have been able to hold my own in the discussions of with other students about these programs. Moreover, I have been able to help a few students with their programs by giving suggestions that have led to improvements in their code and even helped them to find their errors . This has been a real moral booster in that it is showing me that I have been indeed learning something and have some basic knowledge of what is going on in class.