Okay, so last night (really, this morning) I had a meltdown. I stayed up until 1am on Sun 3/27 and Mon 3/28, trying to finish the prework. I finally finished the lessons last night around 8pm and then began trying to write the program we were asked to write. It was a bit crazy and I spent so much time doing it. Initially, I had an idea about how it should work – and I can now say that I was actually on the right track – but then I thought there was a better way and I starting trying to do it that better way – rather than just trying my initial thought and then improving it.
So, lesson #1 is to stick with my original idea, even if I think it is ugly and just get it to work.
I freaked out somewhere around 12:45am last night when I the error messages I was getting were no longer making any sense. One thing I learned was that a lot of the methods that work on strings (e.g. “startswith”) do not work on lists. Once I got rid of all of the syntax errors and runtime errors I got to a point where the program didn’t run and it didn’t give any sort of error message that I have ever seen. It basically had one line – and that I was it. When I googled it, I couldn’t find anything helpful at all. I went to bed thinking that I would have to figure it out one way or another in the morning.
I woke up with a couple of ideas, and none of them worked. So, I started to go back over all of the practice exercises. In my haste to finish the homework, I ended up skipping one set of practice exercises – and therein was the key to this homework. So, in about 45 minutes, I was able to write the program. I was so relieved.
michdcode 