*theDesignersPerspective

Morning Mist

Brain hurts. Crashed hard after dinner. Woke up around 1:30am and continued to study about variables and delegates. Lot’s of reading, not a lot of understanding. Considering that programming seems to be mostly about spatial concepts and behaviors, it’s surprising to me that animation hasn’t been leveraged as a teaching aid. Both teachers so far have used extensive amounts of arm waving to explain how the code is working. Also, the diagrams I’ve seen so far are both aesthetically displeasing, and somewhat lacking in description. Or maybe this shit is just hard.

Cranked through a bunch of exercises today where we read a few paragraphs of text from the book and then copy code to Xcode. Like cooking from a cookbook. Resulting in lil example apps that we build on the iPhone. The purpose is to get us familiar with the different controls provided by foundation kit. In theory, we are supposed to know enough Obj-C syntax from the first two days we spent covering it. So the words I am reading are supposed to have meaning. But I found myself falling behind, spending a lot of time forcing myself to grok something before moving forward. By the second exercise, I realized this technique was not effective. So I started glossing over the text, just looking for the instructions/recipe to get the code into Xcode. I spent the rest of the day doing this. Not really paying too much attention to how it all works. This is really hard for me to do, because I am a control freak. But the output -app running on iPhone with code I typed in- is feeding me positive reinforcement. At the end of the day, I started to pay more attention to what I was doing. It’s all still really blurry, but I am starting to identify higher contrasting areas, and I’m getting more familiar with Xcode.

The beacon of light is dancing through the night mist in the distance. Full sail ahead. Almost there. Oooooooh shiny, siren songs. Crash into the rocks. Bitches…

I managed to catch about 5hrs of scattered sleep, so today I was a lot more alert. I was a lil late to class though.

Still confused as hell about the syntax. Been getting a history lesson on C conventions. Had some fun building example projects on the iPhone though. Good feeling to write some code -even though I am copying it from the book- and then watch it come to life on device. Made an example Quiz app and Map app. Fun.

I like Joe’s teaching style. He gives a lot of context, yet manages to shield us from asking too much too early and getting our eyelids peeled back from the fire-hose of info.

cramming

Today sucked. Or yesterday rather. I tried to cram last night -also put up this blog-, so I didn’t go to sleep. I fell asleep in class a few times. My body just shut down. By the end of the day, I had to fight to keep my eyes open. This was the last day for getting caught up with Obj-C (taught by Mark Fenoglio) so we can dive in to the foundation framework first thing Monday morning with Joe Conway. It was a wasted day.

Mark has been a good teacher. He managed to cover the equivalent of a 4 month college course in just 2 days. We moved really fast. He’s also a really funny guy. A true performer. I wish I would have prepared more before coming here. I understood the stuff I was able to cover prior to arriving when we reviewed them in class, but everything else went right over my head. Straight up charlie brown style. Lack of sleep didn’t help either.

I crashed as soon as I got back to my room (7pm ish) and woke up about 12:30am. I’ve skimmed over the course material for this week, but I still have to brush up on syntax. So I’m going back to the beginning chapters of the first book and reading through until I don’t understand the syntax. Then brushing up on those before I move forward. Each subsequent chapter has a heavy dependency on your knowledge of the last. So I found myself quickly daydreaming while reading because it wasn’t sticking.

Going to catch 2hrs of sleep and wake up a few hours before class to see how far I can get. Did I mention this is really hard.

Creek behind the compound. Taken around 8am. The mist was really thick and beautiful.


Let me just start by giving props where props are due. To anyone I have ever met that is a programmer, respect. To all the good programmers I’ve met and had the pleasure of working with, much respect. You know who you are.

This shit is hard, there is no other way to say it. I mean, I’ve been playing around with html and css for quite a while now and the only skill that seems to transfer over is using a keyboard for input. I am the biggest n00b in my class. Everybody in the class has experience working with another programming language. We are flying through these exercises. I feel more like a secretary working on my WPM than an aspiring entry level programmer. Just when I’m starting to see a glimpse of light, next exercise.

Basically, you must have a good math base, but also be able to comprehend abstract concepts. Some of it is sticking to my noodle, but not much. I’m considering making a series of visualizations later to help remind me of how some of them work.

It kind of reminds me of skateboarding. The first thing you learn how to do is stand on it without falling, then move without falling, then turn, then stop. Once you can maneuver with confidence, the next big challenge is learning how to ollie (def: a jump performed without the aid of a takeoff ramp, executed by pushing the back foot down on the tail of the board, bringing the board off the ground). All other flip tricks are a derivative of an ollie. Kickflip, Heelflip, Bigspin, Impossible, Varial, Nollie, Hardflip, Pressureflip, 360Kickflip. You get the idea. Each trick can be broken down into it’s parts:

(BOOL) Ollie;
(int) xRotation;
(int) yRotation;
(BOOL) StartStance;
(BOOL) EndStance;

I’m still learning how to turn. I won’t be doing flip tricks anytime soon.