A Long Day
Today, I had to work from 7AM to 7PM; we have a tournament once a month that brings in anywhere from 100 to 130 people, and is a full day grind. This was my first long day back at work where I had to be on my foot for the majority of the day since I broke my ankle. My foot is pretty swollen at this point, and I'm hurting, but I made it through. As soon as I got home from work, I had to get right to CS Prep, as the class starts at 7:30 with a couple of warm-up problems to get the juices pumping. I've finished the problems at this point, and am waiting on the actual class to start at 8:30, and we go until 11PM. If yesterday was any indication, today's class will continue to ramp up in difficulty in a quick manner. It's difficult to cram so much material into a couple hours, but David, the instructor, is doing pretty well so far. Yesterday, we started to get into the prototypal chain of objects after introducing methods on objects, all in one class. He spent about 20 or 30 minutes touching on the 'this' keyword, which is nowhere near enough time to cover the most complicated and misunderstood concept in all of JavaScript. If I wasn't already 5 months into learning JavaScript, I think I would be completely lost at this point. As it stands, I'm on the cusp of understanding on a lot of these topics.
I'm coming back to writing this after completing the 3rd session of CS Prep, and it was a bit of a doozy. Typically, the format of the class is to go over yesterday's "Problems of the Day," then go into some lectures, and finally wrap up with a pair programming session. Today, we got really bogged down in the lectures and ran out of time for the pair programming. We started off covering Object.create, moved on to covering the prototypal chain and the new keyword, and quickly moved on to rest parameters and the spread operator. There was a mass of information thrown at us today, and although I've covered everything we went over today, I felt like it was too much to cover in one day. This is enough material to take well over a week of intensive study and still not fully grasp. In Will Sentance's courses, he spent an inordinate amount of time going over this stuff, and I feel like he was a lot more efficient at explaining these concepts, not to knock David. As I've said in the past, Will is the gold standard of instructors, and has this skill down to a science.
I'm exhausted after this long day and I work at 7 tomorrow morning, so I'm likely done for the night. I would really like to do some pair programming with some folk in the cohort, but it's not going to happen tonight. We have the next 2 nights off from the course, so I think I will reach out on the Slack group to see if anyone wants to do a session or two before the class on Saturday. The class on Saturday is a 6 hour class covering callbacks and higher order functions and will be an extensive marathon of a day. I believe it will be broken up into 2 sections, about 3 hours of lecture and about 2 and a half hours of pair programming, so this should be awesome. I feel like the lecture part of this course is mainly meant as a guideline, but the real value is in the pair programming, so hopefully I can take advantage of this. Unfortunately, I don't have any time to work on my JavaScript course by Colt Steele and Stephen Grider, but there are only so many hours in a day.
Until tomorrow!
