Hackbright Fellowship, Day 2

Writing this on BART, heading home from school for the day. My brain hurts, lol. Our exercise today was to create a guessing game in which the computer selects a random number from 1 to 100, then the player has to guess the number. No limit on the number of guesses, the computer tells you to guess higher or lower, and records the number of guesses it took you to get it right. For this exercise, I was paired with a fellow Slytherin house member, a lovely gal named Ivy. We got the basics of the game down fast enough. Then it got...fun (note the slight sarcasm, haha). First we had to account for the user entering something other than a number. That took a bit of working out, but nothing too major. Then came the challenge of taking a float (a number with a decimal point) if input, rounding it up, telling the user it had been rounded up, then giving the higher/lower hint. We seriously racked our brains & Google trying to come up with the right way to implement that...long story short, although the lab instructions said to inform the user their float had been rounded up, it turned out to be very difficult to implement that with the print statement (it basically coverted integers into floats as well)...one of our TA’s, Kiko (super-cool and she has the best laugh!) checked, and it turned out everyone else was having the same problem, and were being told not to actually worry about the print statement.

OK, so that was a long paragraph of coding talk that a) will either be a bunch of gobbledegook to you if you don’t have much coding knowledge, or b) will sound very poorly explained if you have programming knowledge, lol. As my mind is pretty much done thinking about coding for today, I’ll wrap up by saying that Ivy & I did successfully complete the assignment...but as is my tendency, I want to take it, go further with it, and make it do what we were trying to do, as “officially” laid out in the instructions.

However, once I’m back at home, I’ll be doing a few things that are not coding for the rest of the evening. First priority is a good dinner. I’ve been getting back to eating better lately. This is a total must more than ever during the fellowship. Once dinner is ready to eat (and of course, that includes getting Brody his gushy fuds—cat wet food, for those unfamiliar with ridiculous cat-speak), I’ll be watching last night’s new episode of Bates Motel, which I completely forgot about yesterday in my excitement about starting the fellowship! (That’s saying something, anyone who knows me halfway-well knows that show has been an obsession of mine for the past 4 years, and more so now that we’re in the final season.)

One thing that hasn’t happened yet this week is getting to the gym. Admittedly, I haven’t been feeling physically fantastic the past few days, and I’m sure that can partially be attributed to the huge change in schedule, nerves, etc. Playing it by ear this week, but next week I have to establish a regular gym schedule working around a typical week at school. This is probably going to mean a Sunday-Thursday schedule vs. Monday-Friday, as there are events at school on Friday nights. Usually nothing formal, and not required—pretty much just hanging out with the people in our cohort, playing games, Wii, watching movies, and whatnot—but it’s totally important for me to go to these, and of course I want to! I’m having to make a lot of sudden adjustments in my life (as all of us in my cohort are), but that’s cool. Learning to adapt is a very important skill in life...and I’m definitely getting a crash course.

Side note—we had our first Career Coffee this morning. The career services/navigation/curriculum that Hackbright provides is going to be so crucial and key in securing my first position as a software engineer at the end of this program.

Hmmm...what else for today? Can’t think of anything clever or monumental at this moment—I think my brain is tuckered out for the day, and needs to recharge. So I shall bid you good evening for now...more tomorrow.