Fin

Wow, it's hard to believe this is the end. Tomorrow, all my materials will be turned in, and this journal will be done. It's been a good (and bad sometimes) 16 weeks. My narrative is done, and I plan to spend the afternoon writing my research commentary and eating frozen yogurt, then heading to Kinko's to print all my materials. What was once a daunting task now seems manageable, and I can see the light at the end of the year (ha, I'm punny). Even my presentation doesn't seem so scary now, just because I realized while writing my narrative that I have so much to talk about, because so much has happened and it's been such a learning experience. Also I kind of just want to brag about what I've managed to do, because to me, programming is pretty much the coolest thing in the world. It's been good, WISE. :)

Overwhelmed

You'd think as the year was winding down, I'd have more time to relax. But no. I'm swamped with work and it's completely overwhelming. So, once again taking my mentor's advice, I've made a to do list for the week. 11/14 of the things have to be done by Tuesday. Help.

Sample Presentation

Last week, we got to see a very brave student, Luke, present his project in front of basically everyone. This was really cool, because I had no idea what a presentation should look at. From his presentation, I got a lot of insight into what I could add into my presentation. I'd like to borrow his idea of going into the history. This would definitely add resources to my lacking bibliography, and also add something that wouldn't be present elsewhere - journal, narrative.
I think the strongest part of his presentation was his confidence, and that the part I'm most jealous of. I don't have that ability to speak with such certainty, and it really made his presentation bold and interesting.
Differently, I think I'll focus less on a PowerPoint and maybe more on my website itself and the code as my visual aid.

Switching Gears (For real this time)

Commenting is done! DONE DONE DONE. Most people probably won't understand how exciting this is for me, but it's really exciting. I just zipped up all the files and sent them off to my wonderful, amazing sister who said she would look into the two problems I've been unable to solve. Now, with my presentation in less than two weeks from to day, it's time for me to switch my focus to preparation. First step will be to get all the documents done, since those are kind of due in, oh, six days... then I'm going to have to majorly focus on practicing my presentation so that I don't completely freeze up. It'll be fun.

Commenting Commenting Commenting

Argggg. That's about all I have to say. I'm so tired of commenting (even if I made the comment font purple so it's super pretty). I also don't really know the rules of commenting - I had to look up whether or not I should comment my html (I shouldn't. YAAAAY. One less thing). I'm almost done, though, just like 400 more lines of code to go through. Then I can send it off to some super smart person who can solve all my problems while I try and pull together a presentation that won't just be stuttering. Ha. Well, I can hope, at least.

Listening to Your Coaches

I have a hard time taking advice from people I don't know. It's not so bad when someone I'm close to offers a suggestion, but when it's someone I hardly know, I often feel like they're being almost condescending about the way I choose to go about things. I've mentioned this in a earlier post - it bothers me when people tell me all things I could have done better, especially when I put in so much work getting to where I am. I'm not a "natural" programmer - I'm not one of those kids who have been writing code since they could read. I only stumbled upon this whole field a couple years ago. That being said, it also means I do need a lot of help, because I am new at all this. I guess it's just important that I take everything with an open mind, like the article said. I'm not quite at the point where I can easily filter good advice from bad advice, but I need to get there.

Comments

Following on one of my previous entries, where I mentioned how I wish I had commented my code as I was going so that I knew what it actually did, I now have another reason to kick myself over my laziness. I have a couple of problems that I'm completely stumped on, and have been for a good week or two. As the end of the year comes closer and closer, that becomes more of an issue. My sister has been MIA - she got really sick, and as she recovers has to focus on catching up on her own work, so she's too busy to help me. My dad's been looking to see if one of his students would be able to help me out, since it's on such a deadline at this point. Unfortunately, bringing in a new person would be a hassle - especially given the state of my code. Only maybe a fifth, possibly a fourth of it is commented, and it's pretty convoluted. Even someone who knows loads about programming would have trouble understanding it. I really need the help though, so I guess this week isn't going to be about preparing for my presentation, but actually going on a commenting spree. I really wish I'd listened to my Computer Science teacher now when he said that we should always comment everything!

Presentations

If I had to pick a number one nemesis, it might have to be presenting. Speaking in front of people terrifies me. I talk too fast, my voice gets shaky and thin, and oftentimes I even start visibly shaking - needless to say, all this doesn't make my anxiety any better. That's why, as June 11 fast approaches, there's a growing feeling of dread in the pit of my stomach. So, I think it's time to change gears. Even though I still have work to do on my project (honestly, there will always be work to do...), most of it I'm already stumped on and and waiting for help with. For now, I'm going to switch my focus to getting ready for my presentation. I think that if I really plan out what I'm going to say and do, I'll have at least a little more confidence going in, and I need that.

Finding Errors

I've spent the past couple days scanning my code, trying to find where things are going wrong. No luck. So, I've sent a desperate email to my sister asking for help, and in the mean time, I'm starting to comment everything. Hopefully, in writing the comments for all my code I'll be able to find out which parts don't work because I'll have to find out what each part does. It's super tedious, though, even worse  than layout. That's probably why I've put it off for so long - ideally I should comment as I go along, but I'm just too lazy, and I guess that's how I end up in these situations. Oops...

Trial Run

So, Friday I had my first trial run with my game, where I enlisted some friends to help me test in a real game. Quite frankly, it was a disaster. I guess that's to be expected, considering it's only the first test and it's probably even a good thing, because now I know all the issues that I need to work out. All the same, it's kind of discouraging. There were problems with the correct number of cards not showing up, which was an issue I thought I had fixed, but apparently not. Also, more importantly, there was a big problem where once you played a card, you wouldn't get a new one, just keep the same hand of 7 cards for round after round after round. Yeah, that got super boring after a few rounds. Luckily, the friends helping me test it were incredibly supportive and didn't give me a hard time about all the flaws. *phew* I think I'm giving myself a hard enough time as it is! Hopefully, I'll at least have the card problem worked out by this weekend so that the next run will be a little smoother. Fingers crossed!

Deadlines

Phyllis Korkki's article on deadlines is strangely informal for a New York Times article, but I think that's what makes it all the more relatable. I know very well how it is to put off work, especially for a big project that has a faraway deadline (*cough*WISE*cough*), and while I haven't recruited anyone to hound me to do my work, I have had to break my project down into smaller pieces that I can assign deadlines to. Because without a deadline, I don't have the motivation to get something done - it's not due, I don't have to do it. Let's face it, I'm a total slacker at heart. This week, I do have a public deadline. By Friday, I have to have the hand of cards up and working so that my second trial run of the game will not be such a disaster (more on that at a later date). It's not fun to play Apples to Apples when you have the same cards round after round. And, I've promised my friends that I'll have this fixed by this weekend, so it's a deadline I have to meet.

Happiness Revisited

1) It's hard to place when I feel most happy. I think it would probably when I've just accomplished something, like a good grade on a test or scoring a goal. Either that, or when I'm just spending time with the people I care about, friends, family, my hockey team, and just hanging out, not doing anything in particular.

2) The article, Happiness Revisited, was very thought provoking. I'd never really considered what happiness was before or how to achieve it, and I found they was the author presented the idea interesting. I was especially intrigued by the idea that you can only really be happy when you've worked hard to achieve something. While this certainly is one type of happiness, I'm not sure it's the only one. Certainly I feel happy when I wake up and realize I still have a few more hours of sleep, or when I'm just laughing with my friends, and in those cases I haven't done any work leading up to the happiness.

3) Currently, I'm at the anxiety spot in the flow chart. The challenges that I'm facing are harder than I feel comfortable tackling, and I'm at the point where I think I need to turn to help before I'm swamped.

4) In the past month, I've been bouncing back between anxiety and flow, sometimes in my zone and sometimes taking on too much. Overall, it's been a pretty good spot for me, even if stretching my limits has been stressful. It's certainly a better place than the first part of my project, where I was definitely grounded in the boredom section of the flow chart.

5) I think I can achieve flow when I know what I need to get done, and how to get there (mostly). For me, this means I often have to ask for help when I first start something, and then one I get that lead in, I can do it on my own and I'm in the flow channel.

Suggestions

Recently, I've been working on the layout of my website, and I hit a bit of a snag in trying to figure out how to make the text show up. The problem was that the text of the "unicorn cards" wouldn't show up very well against the background. I'd been trying to experiment with making the text shadow different colors and thicknesses in order to make it more readable, but nothing was really helping. So, working on it fourth period in the library, I was getting frustrated. Then, a friend who was working at the table suggested that I make a semi-transparent background for the text. Throughout the course of my project, I've had lots of people throwing suggestions at me. It gets a little irksome, because oftentimes I just keep getting told how I could have done something better, and I don't always think like a super efficient programmer type person. For me, I'm excited if I can make something work, even if it there's a way to make it work that would take less code. Because of this, I might not be as open to suggestions as I should be. However, I was pretty desperate at this point, so I looked into opacity of images, and played around with that a little bit until I got the text to a point where you could actually read it. I guess I need to learn to filter the ideas people give me, so that I can follow up the useful ones, and put aside the ones that I don't need, because evidently some of those ideas can be lifesavers (though that's a bit of an exaggeration).

 

Pictures!

Last night, deciding to take a break from studying calculus, I thought I would spend maybe an hour, tops, coloring in the sketches I had done earlier. 3+ hours later, I was done. It's kind of amazing what a huge difference having real pictures in my game makes, instead of the stand-in green and red rectangles. I still need to fix the text and make it readable (kind of necessary, I suppose), but already it looks a lot better.

Testing

After a few minor fixes (which are turning out to take forever and maybe not be so minor. Gah.), I'd really like to start getting into testing in the next week or so. This would mean actually getting people to play a real game, and see what still needs to be done or doesn't work right. However, before I start this, I'd like it to look semi-presentable, which means having the final unicorn and dragon card pictures, and not just the stand-in rectangles currently in place. Initially, my younger sister was going to do all the artwork for the game, and yesterday she handed me these elaborate drawings. They were really well done - but not at all what I needed or envisioned. When we had been doing rough sketches, we had just drawn out the head of the unicorn and dragon, not full body pictures, so that's the image that I've had of it. Also, her drawings were so full of detail that you wouldn't have been able to read the text once it was put over. I think that if I want the images to come up the way I want, I'm going to have to draw them myself. This is going to be tricky, because I am in no way an artist. Uh-oh...

Comfort Zones

In Mr. Grazer's presentation on This I Believe, he mentions that you have to disrupt your comfort zones to really grow. This is something I've definitely noticed throughout the course of my project. The first phase was completely within my comfort zone - reading books was no stretch of my abilities. The second phase, though, was utterly foreign and overwhelming and I had no clue what to do or where to start. It was so new, and so out of my comfort zone, that if it hadn't been something I had to do for class, I'd probably have chickened out and given up. Now, three weeks into phase two, I'm so glad I didn't. I've not only been enjoying my work much more, but I've also learned a million times more from pushing my limits and trying new things than I had in the entirety of my phase one. It's been a great experience.

Back to Work

Ack! I've been so caught up on working on my project that I've been forgetting to blog about it. So, a summary of what I've gotten done in the past few days: I'm now totally on Amazon Web Services, phew! It was a bit of a struggle getting there - I must have sent my sister a good 5 emails during the process. But it's all set now and my mini-crisis was averted. After that, I was able to start actually working on the program again. I've successfully (I think) added a button that will allow a user to leave the game, and I'm working on making an end game button. There're some issues where the tabs in my code don't copy over to the server, which is weird and really annoying, because those indents are kind of necessary for the code to work. I guess that's probably something I should look into...

Setbacks

Everything was going so smoothly until I got an email yesterday saying that dotcloud (the platform I was using to host my website) is going to be getting rid of their free option in about 3 weeks. Gah. Luckily, my sister did some research and found out that Amazon Web Services would be able to host it for free for the first 12 months. Not so luckily, it's way more complicated to use and especially to set up, so she sent me about a three page email of instructions. I can't really bring myself to look at it right now, and there's nothing I can do anyways, because it involves downloading a few things, so I have to wait until I get back to school and use the internet there. I suppose it's time for a break, though, since I've spent a good 25-30 hours on my project over the break.

NYC

Wow, I don't even know where to start. So much has happened in the last two days that it's going to be impossible to get it all down, but I'll do my best to summarize the main points. Needless to say, this is going to be a bit of a long entry - apologies in advance.

First of all, I just want to say that I have the best sister in the entire world. She uncomplainingly spent a warm, sunny day indoors working on coding with me for 21 hours straight, and even longer in total.

With that out of the way, I'll get to what we managed during that time. In a previous entry, I mentioned that I was only learning Python instead of all the languages I intended to learn. Completely null and void now. I can now say that I've successfully dabbled in Python, CSS, JavaScript, HTML, and MySQL. Yeah, I'm pretty sure I've learned more in the past two days than I have in the entire first phase of my project. I guess learning from a book really doesn't work for me, and I just need to get out and do it.

We decided that since I couldn't stay very long, it would be best just to get all the logic of the program done, and not worry about layout or catching errors or anything like that. All of that is stuff that I can do on my own without too much trouble, and it will probably take a long time anyways. So, we started off by creating a login screen. The screen doesn't contain too much, just gives you the option to login with a username and password or create a new account. Then, once you log in go to a new screen where you have the option to create a new game if there isn't one going on currently, or to join a game if there is one. The person who creates the game is automatically the judge, and once everyone who has joined the game chooses a red card (these will become "unicorn" cards once we get the drawings done), the judge gets to click on their favorite. That player gets a point, the next player to have joined becomes the judge, and everyone automatically gets a new unicorn card.

This all sounds pretty basic - it works like Apples to Apples, big surprise! However, it took ages to get this done, and it was pretty frustrating. Most errors were silly things and really easy to fix, but then some were super hard to find, especially as night turned to morning, since we were so exhausted by that point.  Sometimes variables weren't what we thought they were, or types didn't match up. At one point, an entire section of our code kept getting skipped, and we spent a good 20 minutes trying to figure out why. It turned out that we were comparing an integer to a string, so they came out as not equal, but we couldn't tell because they both printed out as "7". Another frustrating thing is uploading everything to the server. After every change you make, you have to "push" the code to the server,

which takes a good 3-4 minutes. Really annoying because you can't tell if the changed worked until that happened, and most times it takes at least a few changes to fix a problem.

Game screen

Login screen

In any case, we were able to work through all the problems we encountered, and get sososo much done. With my sister's help, I've reached a point where I can continue the rest of the work by myself - though it takes me a lot longer to fix errors by myself than it did with her. I'm working on creating a to-do list of everything I need to update or add or fix so that I don't forget, and that I never get lost on what I should be doing. Mostly now, though, I need to work on the layout and fixing anything that goes wrong. The game works if every player does the right thing, but it would be silly to expect that to always happen. Accidents always happen, and I need to get the code to prepare for that. There's still so much for me to do, but I've gotten a great start.

More Lists

On the advice of my mentor, Ms. Seifert, I've started making some lists to keep from getting completely overwhelmed. And what better time than a slow morning at work on some receipt paper?