Phew, day nine is over and in the rear view mirror and day ten kicked off with a few hours of self-directed work. It really seemed to come at just the right time for a lot of us, myself included. I got caught up on a lot of the things that were giving me trouble and by the end of the day was really feeling like I was back in the driver’s seat with my learning.

I’m finally starting to instinctively break things down into smaller chunks. I was expecting this sort of progress to come with a light bulb over my head, fireworks or some other sort of stark realization that I had made progress. Instead it came from solving a problem and looking at my solution and realizing that I solved it differently than I would have a couple days ago without even noticing I was doing it.

I’m also starting to get a little bit of a handle on refactoring. I managed to get our pigeon hash problem working and then condensed some of my code that was running in different parts of the program into a single method at the end to execute all the sub-methods at once. I’m happy that I spotted this and was able to make my code better without breaking its functionality. After looking at some of the solutions my classmates came up with however, I still know that I have a lot of work to do with refactoring as some of their solutions were brilliant!