Day 24: CodeIgniter

Yesterday had to be one of my worse days in the Coding Dojo. When I tried to teach myself Rails earlier this year I couldn't understand much of the material and it killed me that I might not be cut out for a career as a web developer. This last month has been very enriching with learning materials that would have taken me months to learn on my own. I felt confident enough to tackle on a simple web application framework like CodeIgniter as a baby step towards the bigger challenges of Rails in two months. However yesterday was spent mostly reading and rereading entire sections to just understand one stupid little line of code that I was having flashbacks to the failure of my independent studies. It was demoralizing and I went home defeated. 

I wasn't looking forward to today that much and procrastinated arriving here early by watching some documentary during and after breakfast. I got here on time for the more algorithm routine and I didn't contribute to the team effort, just laid there and watched everyone in a tired state. After we got going on our daily work routine I moved onto the next section which was a video demonstration on how CodeIgniter works. After spending all of yesterday reading the material and setting the framework up on my computer and github a lot of the materials were looking very familiar. I got cracking on the first assignment moments before the group went out to lunch and I felt much better. My dad would often tell me that I am too impatient. Whenever he tries to instruct me on something I'm obviously jittering with eagerness to get started, regardless if I knew what I was doing. Listening to lectures on Frameworks isn't fun but coding definitely is, even if I didn't know what I was doing. 

I remembered that I am here because they promised me full immersion into coding and less theories and lectures that encompassed most of my school time. More action and less talking.

I completed the first assignment after lunch and I felt proud about what I had accomplished with such an enormous subject. I moved on to the second assignment and then the third one, the one I was suppose to have completed yesterday. I'm probably going to have to come in here on the weekend but I'm already doing that so no worries. 

For lunch today a bunch of us went to an asian chain restaurant and I had the walnut shrimp with white rice. It was really good and in such high servings that I had to take some back with me. However after lunch I felt sick, like I got food poisoning. Fortunately I didn't throw up and I forgot about it after a couple of hours of coding. After I finished my second assignment I went to eat some more for dinner and the feeling came back. I don't think it's not so much food poisoning but something in the sauce that gives my brain the vomiting sensation. I've never had that kind of sauce before that I don't think my body is accustomed to it. Wouldn't be the first time that has happened. My parents are from Peru but whenever we go to visit I can't drink the milk because it is treated differently than in the US, and I never grew up on it, so I get sick. 

After going through a few assignments I began to recognize a pattern in the CodeIgniter framework that I forked a copy and made modifications to  it so expedite trivial tasks. I pushed the changes onto my Github account for rapid deployment. More modifications will follow. 

One of the Dojo's philosophies is strength through struggle. There are plenty of hard times here and the temptation to quit does rise up but if we hold our ground, keeping coding and doing our assignments then we can overcome the struggles and become strong enough to handle even bigger challenges. There will be more days when I will be feeling down but I need to remind myself that it has passed once before and these too will pass.