Ok. In time. Lets do Quiz 1. That was frustrating. I thought I had
understood the key concepts of Ruby quite well but I was wrong (see this article). I managed to
answer correctly most of the questions but had answered many ones wrong too so I had to study more to understand why I had them wrong. The course's wiki was very helpful. I found useful links about Regular Expressions and other concepts that I encountered for the first time. Also, major help was stackoverflow. We were only given one chance to answer each question in the quiz so I finished this one early! I had two and a half days to do the homework exercises. Oh, I am getting tired. This seems a lot of work.
I actually took a break and went for a walk with my friends after days of studying. I reserved it! It was my reward and the small push I needed to keep going. Those times you think again and again what you do and why you are doing it. I love those times. You get to take important decisions then. Well, I realised how much I loved this course and that I was looking forward to go back home and start the homework. You are probably thinking now that I have boring friends but I can assure you that that's not the case! It is just the passion for something new and exciting that drives you.
Back to homework! Oh no, regular expressions in the first exercise! One of the things I had wrong in the quiz. I have to understand very well how they work in order to pass this exercise. I can now see that the stuff did a good job. They chose exercises that force you to understand some key concepts in Ruby. They're not just playing around, that's for sure. It took a little time but actually it wasn't as difficult as I thought at first. This applies to all the exercises. As long as you understood the concept, writing the code wasn't too difficult. You had to be careful though. For example, in the second exercise we had to implement a "rock, paper, scissors" game. Easy, I thought. I wrote the code but it was too big and too slow so the autograder didn't accept it. It wasn't in time. I was angry in the beginning because I knew my code was correct and thought that due to the stuff's inability to make a good autograder i would lose valuable points. That was not the case. All students in the class should learn to write fast code as it is aimed for the web and is run in all sort of machines! This is part of the cloud philosophy.
Eventually I managed to do all the exercises and understand the concepts quite well. I want to thank the forum for the help. It was really valuable when I got stuck (it happened quite often!). Now I am ready for week 2 and Rails! This is gonna be a challenge! I am way out of my league in there. So let's see!
This is a screenshot of my progress! I will post one of these each week.
I actually took a break and went for a walk with my friends after days of studying. I reserved it! It was my reward and the small push I needed to keep going. Those times you think again and again what you do and why you are doing it. I love those times. You get to take important decisions then. Well, I realised how much I loved this course and that I was looking forward to go back home and start the homework. You are probably thinking now that I have boring friends but I can assure you that that's not the case! It is just the passion for something new and exciting that drives you.
Back to homework! Oh no, regular expressions in the first exercise! One of the things I had wrong in the quiz. I have to understand very well how they work in order to pass this exercise. I can now see that the stuff did a good job. They chose exercises that force you to understand some key concepts in Ruby. They're not just playing around, that's for sure. It took a little time but actually it wasn't as difficult as I thought at first. This applies to all the exercises. As long as you understood the concept, writing the code wasn't too difficult. You had to be careful though. For example, in the second exercise we had to implement a "rock, paper, scissors" game. Easy, I thought. I wrote the code but it was too big and too slow so the autograder didn't accept it. It wasn't in time. I was angry in the beginning because I knew my code was correct and thought that due to the stuff's inability to make a good autograder i would lose valuable points. That was not the case. All students in the class should learn to write fast code as it is aimed for the web and is run in all sort of machines! This is part of the cloud philosophy.
Eventually I managed to do all the exercises and understand the concepts quite well. I want to thank the forum for the help. It was really valuable when I got stuck (it happened quite often!). Now I am ready for week 2 and Rails! This is gonna be a challenge! I am way out of my league in there. So let's see!
This is a screenshot of my progress! I will post one of these each week.
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| Saas progress - week 1 |
