(Hacker School: Week 3, Day 3)

This is a quick post about today and yesterday - not on any particular topic, and more on my own sluggish and sometimes frustrating progress. This one’s definitely HS-specific.

I spent much of yesterday following a fairly involved tutorial in Flask - but only got through the first five pieces. As has often been true for me lately (and seems to be true of any programming/CS topic), learning something really means learning 25 things - and I never know upfront how much I don’t know.

The rest of the day, and some of today, I started a (very free!!) online course (aka MOOC) in Algorithms from Stanford. I find that the concepts are complex, but I can wrap my mind around them - but struggle with translating them into code. I’m lucky that I have the time and energy to struggle through problems - and hopefully in that way making them stick (tm) - but I find that process a bit disheartening sometimes. It’s a similar struggle, between spending a ton of time understanding every detail and being comfortable moving on from something if it isn’t important.

Finally, today I picked up my own project that I’d been working on prior to starting here. I essentially took all of the available data from the IMDb Top 250 - a publicly-voted list of the best films of all time (HIGHLY subjective - and often biased) - since it began in 1996. I’ll leave out the specifics of how I did that for now, but I think that could be a later post. I then translated it into an interactive visualization - one where you can easily digest how the public’s feelings (through a pretty big and untrustworthy, but best available, proxy) on particular movies have changed over time. I was able to port all of the data I have from Excel/csv to a real database, and got it to display the visualization - but it’s over 800,000 rows of data, so it’s extremely slow. Hoping to come up with a way to speed it up and make it usable, because I think it’ll be pretty cool.

The best parts of the past two days have been working with others - though I’ve often approached it less positively than I should, because I have so much I want to work on by myself. When I can come to terms with the idea that I’ll never finish everything I want, and that I always learn more from working with others than on my own, I’ll be a bit more comfortable. But I sat in two really interesting sessions - one by Mary, one of the facilitators here at HS, about the inner workings of Git (it helped in thinking about the seemingly impossible-to-penetrate way that Git actually works); and one in which a group of us met to talk about the Algorithms course so far. Both were enlightening and made me feel less frustrated and stuck in my own progress; I hope to keep working in those kinds of sessions.

More tomorrow.