The onboarding phase finally came to a halt and the probationary week is about to begin. I've been overwhelmed with a variety of feelings that I couldn't exactly ascertain. I've definitely been looking forward to this, but I just couldn't shake off the anxiety. The curtain was about to be drawn and the anticipation was real.

A night before the first day, and I went to bed some minutes after eleven. I had to abruptly leave a Google meeting I was attending with peers in preparation for the next day's projects. It was already the eleventh hour and I didn't want to be the guy that woke up late on such an important day. Moreover, ALX emphasized the significance of sleep in one of her projects and I definitely wanted to be in my best condition the next day. - only if wishes were horses. I'd done my part of going to bed, but I just couldn't sleep; I was just so excited. I tried controlling my emotions but that didn't work. Eventually, I got some sleep and woke up in about twenty minutes after five in the morning; I guess every vein of my body must've been too excited to sleep any further. I kept looking at the planning section of the intranet, hoping it would soon be six; that was the time projects were released or at least supposed to. Thirty minutes after six and I still couldn't access the projects; I quickly slid into slack and made a complaint, while tagging a mentor but was just told it takes time. I just wished this time was accounted for in the deadlines but I doubt there's even a grace period, not like I want to risk finding out tho lol. Few more minutes and I could now access slack. Luckily, the projects were a repetition of the tasks (shell and emacs) in the onboarding phase but this time; we only had less than 24 hours to complete tasks that lasted for a week during onboarding. This time, they were also graded so we definitely had to give our best shot. Fortunately, I hadn't destroyed my sandbox this time so I could reuse the previous ones with some tweaking.

Second day, and I still had trouble with sleep. I kept refreshing my intranet until I could access my projects. This time, it was the vim and git tasks from onboarding too. I successfully tweaked my vim tasks to contain the necessary directory, files and tasks but git was a pain in the neck for a moment. While trying to manipulate my previous tasks to satisfy the current requirements, I discovered the 'git mv' command for renaming directories in repositories which is basically a git version of the 'mv'. Now, some self-righteous people may disagree with the way I completed the projects of day 1 and 2 but in our endeavor to #dohardthings, let's not totally shun the "smart" way or doing hard things might lose its meaning. And trust me, tweaking previous projects to satisfy current requirements is an experience of its own. We probably won't get such an opportunity anytime soon.

For the third day, a new project was released on the basics of shell scripting. Really, this made all previous tasks on 'shell' look cute. We really lacked even the basic knowledge on shell scripting. I had seen some videos but seeing the structures of the questions could make one question their knowledge. Well that would have been the case if it was totally unexpected but some of us had the support of a senior cohort member and were fully prepared. As much as that didn't reduce the difficulty of the questions, it did make things relatively easier for us compared to others.

Thursday; another day, another deadline to meet. Now it's a project on shell permissions; we knew there was still more to shell scripting. From ascertaining the effective user, switching between users, manipulating file permissions and ownership to checking and changing groups. There was so much to absolve in so little time but we had to make it happen. By the way, "chmod" and "chown" are very powerful commands with a lot of options.

Thank GOD it's Friday. This was the only time we had to revise the previous projects for the week. Truly, the importance of peer learning days cannot be overemphasized. It was the time we had to refresh all the knowledge we had to bombard into our heads. This time, we could take things slow and make the knowledge truly ours. The Feynman learning technique has been overly emphasized and peer learning is an essential means to uphold it.

Overall, this week has been a roller-coaster but we definitely scaled through. Having the support of a senior cohort member is truly reassuring.