It's another week of probation. To fellow cohort members that made it this far, hats off to y'all; it's not been easy. More importantly, I appreciate readers that saw me through this phase. It's the third week of probation; yes with just one week left and the pace of learning is even faster than ever. In this week alone, there were about three peer learning days, however fixed on project deadlines.
Monday was a peer learning day; which is reasonable considering the intensity and difficulty of last week's projects. However it was clashing with the last (second) deadline day for two of last week's projects so we barely had time to revise. The intensity was real and we had to keep by all means.
Tuesday, was bombarded with two different projects and moved directly to working with headers, functions and nested loops. As Alx would have it, we had only a day to grasp the concept; at this point it's no longer surprising, it's however still exhausting. I had no time to even look at the second project; trying to finish the first was already overkill with brain-draining questions one had to solve. What's more? Knowing how to solve these questions wasn't near enough, neither was grasing the right syntax to write out the code. What's more important is to stick with alx's strict requirements; merely complying with her coding style wasn't enough to make your code compile. Good thing the second project's deadline extended to the next day. Having to create functions to work with very large numbers without being able to use "long long", "arrays'' nor any standard library was really a drag. We could only use alx's version of "putchar" to print.
It's the third day of the week, and I had to work on the last project I couldn't do the previous day. I did skim through it before going to bed but that was about all I could do. The first project already took about seventeen hours of my time and I was too exhausted to do anything else. Anyways, this project was on debugging and having skimmed through, it wasn't supposed to be too difficult or so i thought but trust alx to make even the simplest things difficult. This time, the details of the checker weren't available so one couldn't exactly know what was wrong with their solutions. And this here is the ironic part; you might have the right solution to a problem but still fail most of the checks simply because of a requirement. The worse situation is other checks failing due an earlier one. I call this the "recursive" fail. However, I was even more concerned because this could mean being unable to access the checker details of future projects. And as fate would have it, my fears were about to be confirmed. I also learnt that not every year divisible by four is actually a leap year.
It's the fourth day, and there's already another project. It was tagged with more functions and nested loops so I expected it to be way more difficult than Tuesday's but personally I found it less difficult, maybe because I already expected the worst. However, some people did claim it was more difficult. More importantly, I really had issues with working with really large numbers while limited to various restrictions.
Friday was another peer learning day and I would admit, though coupled with evaluation quizzes, I did have time to take a break and spent it trying to update the shell script I came up with to automate "git add, commit and push" to different branches depending on the number of arguments specified. It also echoes an error message if the user doesn't specify an argument.
Overall, this week started with a little break and ended with the same. Amidst these breaks however was a roller-coaster of projects with no break in between. More importantly, next week's projects might involve working with pointers and I'm kinda excited about it. I feel like there's a gap in my knowledge of pointers and hope it gets filled. The probation period ends in one week. Look forward to it