Pseudocoding is Wonderful (and so are partners!)

Before I start to talk about my experiences coding at home this week, I have to say that working with Adina last week was a really helpful experience for me (working with other people, it seems, was helpful to a whole lot of folks. Aside from the base-level satisfaction of having two brains working on a problem rather than just one (of course, with various other sources of advice), the fact is that Adina helped me out a lot when it comes to actually understanding what my code was accomplishing/why it was wrong/why it was right. I only wish that I could have been as helpful to her as she was to me (in my perception of the situation, at the very least). Nevertheless, last class was, on a whole, immensely helpful to me.

Which bring me to the other thing that I wanted to talk about here: pseudocode. At first, I was reluctant to pseudocode out my stuff before I worked on it, my idea being that I would end up doing more work than just through trial and erroring out the code (I’m just being honest about my shitty opinions here). But after my last few weeks of struggles and a little bit of difficulty catching up, I decided to try out pseudocode for myself after it helped so much in the in-class example last week.

Wow. What a breakthrough.

Seriously, pseudocode has been soooooooo helpful for me in figuring out exactly what has to be done to get things up to spec, how to solve the dailies, and what I can actually accomplish with code (a lot more than I thought). So, while the majority of this week’s code has gone into catching up on previous dailies as opposed to Not Pacman, I have a much better idea of what has to go into the actual finished product and how to do it. Which feels, to be honest, pretty fucking incredible. I’m excited for open lab hours.