Today, I played it smart, and only had half a cup of coffee. I also brought some fud to snack on so that I wouldn't be on a completely empty stomach, since I heard sugar in coffee (and milk I guess?) is what gives you energy for the metabolism increase it causes you, and since I drank it black, I needed something else to fill me up.
We started off the day with study hall, and I began to go over the practice assessment again, starting with what I knew. It's so daunting. There's just so many pieces to it.
However, our project of the day was more of the same, with some add-ons. Today we had to build a clone of Le Reddit. Le Epic Le Memez Le Super Secret Club Le Reddit!!!!11 Did you know in the old N64 games, Donkey Kong fortells the future? Really, he does. Listen to him in Mario Party 2 or Mario Kart 64 for example. He says, "Reddit! Reddit!" Yes. Donkey Kong was a Redditor before it was hip and with it. No really, listen!
Like the 99 Cats Auth project, I thought this one went well too. I got another partner who was easygoing and good to work with, and I felt like I knew a little more than before as we went through the project. There were even parts where I was able to do by myself! Not that I rushed ahead or anything. I checked in with my partner to make sure we were going on the same path, and we were able to build the Le Reddit Clone which I will name Dreadit, at least up to where it has nested comments. We got it so users could register and sign on, make subs, make posts, and make comments.
It's actually quite a bit of work, and there's a lot of code that can be made more DRY, but I think it was good assessment practice, and I feel like the progress we made was Quite Good.
One part both of us weren't sure about was the inverse of added to our association in Post. The easiest way I can understand it, is when an association needs a value of something to not be nil, but it is nil, because you're trying to build things that rely on each other at the same time, giving inverse of let's you build as if you have the values you need as being not nil, and if it validates successfully, it'll continue its course like normal. It took me a while to get, and I'm still not sure I really get it, but Daniel said it isn't particularly common, and Rails tends to do most of the inverses for you anyway. I don't getit... how I dreadit! If you see this post, it means you readit!
Quite a few people also stayed after to practice for the assessment. What I find seems to help is to do the assessment, one file at a time, making sure I memorize it, know what goes into it, as well as understanding it. I feel like I'm so far off still from getting the assessment down, and I don't expect to succeed... but I'll try my best, and at the very worst, I'll have at least learned enough to start building my own web apps. :) :(
We also had one of our cohort mates depart today. I think it was voluntary. Our cohort is still at large, but from what I've heard, the number might start shrinking more towards the last half. :S
I also learned over the weekend and today about messing with web pages through inspect elements! It's a lot of fun. I'm going to definitely play around with that more and as I learn more about web development, hopefully utilize that for performing some fun and saucy tricks. :0) Until then, I need to cram out the studies for this scary exam.
