Work it Out

I am learning how to use w3 Schools and Stack Overflow to my advantage at this point. Whenever I am confused about something, I can for the most part find an answer through these two resources. Struggling through the process of setting up functional user-tagging turned out to far more difficult than I was expecting, despite my plans to devote two weeks to the cause. Each time I thought I was getting to a point where I knew what was going on, I discovered an entirely new level of unexpected complications. I was growing more and more confused because every time I found a viable solution or explanation, I then had to go and look up nearly every word of the explanation. By the time I had whittled down my search into the most basic elements that I could understand, I lost track of what high-level concept I was looking into in the first place.

   
    I decided to learn what I could from what I already understood: the Ruby code in the Community IDE. I knew I needed to find examples of what I was trying to do, so I stuck to that and what I could find of Community Engine source code online. I also found that my peers are very helpful when I ask for advice. Working as a team can be challenging sometimes, but here, I feel completely supported by the people I work with. For instance, I was having trouble making sense of Michael’s new additions to the worlds show page and the corresponding stylesheets, so I finally just asked him to explain his ideas. He explained where he was coming from and we both worked together, in our own branches, to improve his new feature on the page.

    Speaking of teamwork, I learned more about git Bash than I have before. I have the hang of merging with all the other branches now, thanks to the super-handy instructions Reilly posted on the wall for everyone to see. Being able to pull from, push to, and then merge to the origin branch helps me see firsthand what everyone else has been working on. It also helps me learn how to resolve any conflicts and work toward the same solution with a handful of other people, which is probably a good life skill. We’ll see.

    More than anything this week, I learned how to figure things out on my own. I feel I am gaining more and more independence as each week passes. I suppose that’s part of the point of being here but it still feels great to experience. I am getting comfortable with finding my own solutions, using my own logic, navigating a mass of files, looking at something in an entirely new light in order to better understand it. I’m happy I have gotten to this point. I plan to use the next four weeks to the fullest extent because I have so many more plans to fulfill.