Day 24: The Christmas Python
>>> Brief overview
Today blew by me — I can barely remember what I worked on. Looking back over Athena, I realize I did a lot:
- Finalized the primary language question so the quiz now has four questions!
- Updated some JavaScript form checking (but it’s pretty spotty, honestly)
- Built out a nice data visualization using chart.js of user scores and some basic interaction, whee!:
I can tell that fatigue is setting in because I shied away a few times from harder problems when they first bubbled up and distracted myself with some bootstrap finagling, until I caught that as a pattern of bad behavior. Though honestly, Athena could really benefit from some beautification, because her look and feel can only be described as highly janky at this point, but that’s for next week.
Despite my measurable progress, my favorite thing about today was definitely this morning’s lecture. We covered some of Python’s soft underbelly, including how a hash map is made, where linked lists and doubly-linked lists come in handy, and why pancakes are delicious (okay that one I found on my own).
>>> Where I struggled
I’m running out of steam, and I’m starting to feel highly conflicted about how I’m spending my time. I really like coding and poking around at my app, and I’m SUPER PUMPED to add in an SMS messaging component with the Twilio API starting tomorrow, but I can’t help but distract myself with all the new data structures we are learning, and sorting algorithms, and all the logic puzzles at the back of Cracking the Coding Interview. I want it all! But of course, I’ve mastered none of it. Yet.
However, we’ve only got a few days left until Code Freeze, and there is no way I’d show this thing to anyone during a job interview yet, so I guess my priorities have been determined for me through Sunday.
>>> Thoughtful takeaway
I’ve got something I need to confess, and Mom if you’re reading this, be forewarned that it’s about snakes*.
Throughout Hackbright, I catch my own imagination zoomorphizing the Python program into a big snake. As in The Python. As in the grand, clever, nurturing, snake we know and fear and love. The one python to rule them all. I don’t know if this is a Python community thing or just a Hackbright thing, but people here often parse code aloud to our dear Python, saying things like:
“I wanted to filter down to unique lists, so I said, ‘Hey Python, put these lists in a set, please.’ But Python was all like ‘whoah, lists are an unhashable type.’
That was dumb of me, of course mutables can’t go in sets. Sorry, Python.”
We converse with this proverbial snake. So of course, my imagination has painted a clear picture of her. I imagine she’s big, but constantly changing in size, and sort of menacing if you didn’t know better. When we learn about something else she can do, I see her slithering down the chimney with a fetching red santa hat on, like a big Christmas Python, bearing the gift of an ordered dictionary!
O(1) for everything? Oh Python, you shouldn’t have.
*To be clear, legend (and Wikipedia) has it that Guido named Python for the British comedy, not the snake. This is my own musing.
