We ended Week 1 trying to implement Conway’s Game of Life. I didn’t make much progress during pair programming, so I tried starting from scratch over the weekend. Things I thought of while trying to implement the program:
1. I need to take time to think about and draw out the program more. I tend to start typing whatever comes in my mind, even when my thoughts are nowhere near complete. I struggled implementing the step function, and I only figured it out when I stepped away from the js file. I needed to think about each step I needed to take and how I could get there.
2. Bind. Ahhh! Joe was kind enough to post his solution to Game of Life on Saturday. Looking at his code helped me understand things I was confused about.
I realized whenever I made an onclick event on a button, the context of this changed from the game of life to the actual button. I was confused as to why this is, and I think I’m still struggling to fully understand the way the program is working.
In addition, I struggled to implement autoplay and pause correctly despite it seeming like a very easy task. I figured all I had to do was something like
var autoplay = setInterval(gameOfLife.step, 100) to start autoplay and
clearInterval(autoplay) to pause.
However, I struggled because I couldn’t actually access the autoplay variable. That was set inside the enableAutoPlay function and so I couldn’t access it in my pause function. I tried to set it outside the variables but that just caused autoplay to occur immediately when the script loaded. Bind was the solution to this dilemma also, although I’m working on fully understanding how the magic works. Off to watch some videos on bind and maybe read. Perhaps I will post about bind next time.
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