Day 21: Object-Oriented Programming

So I finished The Wall yesterday afternoon. It took me less than a week and it felt like an accomplishment. Back in college I had a term project for Web Programming 1 to design a website for healthy foods that included a message board. My partner and I held off on doing that work until the last three weeks. I must have spent about a week designing the front-end from scratch; after that I spent another week working on the javascript interactions; then finally my partner set up some cheap SQL database for messages. By the time presentation day came around we had a horribly built, barely interactive site for the class to see. I was more relieved than accomplished over the work we had done and as I saw other groups present more elegant and interactive sites I told myself that web development is not in my future. The negative feelings towards web design were driven future in during a Logic Design course where the TA told some students that he took that same web programming course years ago to fulfill a requirement and he thought it was so easy that it was almost insulting. He advised the class not to take it since it offered no real challenge. The Wall was twice as challenging and with less than a week to complete and I not only met the requirements but also turned it in with elegance and interaction. I didn't just survive, I thrived.

I was on another roll and got started on the next chapter: Object-Oriented Programming. I've been lectured on that stuff since my first engineering course. OOP deals with data structures. As data grows we need more efficient ways of managing it. Manage it improperly and it could take forever to do a search or log someone into their account.

I must have covered this stuff for about a year in college and while this was never my best subject the concepts are still familiar enough to handle the basics, which I mostly covered on Sunday. Monday was spent working on the advanced chapter. I'm only halfway done and am currently stuck on link lists. Link Lists: the bane of Advanced Computer Programming. I'm surprised I managed to pass that class on account of those little nodes linked together by pointers. If it were up to me I'd manage all my data through arrays but the professor kept saying that I'll be looking towards this on the day that my arrays are so big that I'll be waiting too long for them to get processed. That actually happened once for another class where I created a 100x100 multi-dimensional, binary array and I literally waited half-an-hour for the loops to process them. That's not an experience I intend on repeating.

Most of us are stuck on linked lists and we're waiting for the instructor to demo it tomorrow. I don't know if that'll help much but at least tomorrow will be spent mostly tackling this challenge. I can do it, The Wall proved that I can.