Second Lab Post

My coding experience continues to move in waves of deep frustration and childlike elation. I was able to post my reading blog post just fine last Thursday afternoon, but on Thursday night at 10:30 pm or so I posted my lab blog post the exact same way only to receive multiple e-mails from GitHub reading ‘Page Build Error’ without any explanation as to what the error was or how I could fix it. I e-mailed Scott about this and he was very understanding, and I also e-mailed GitHub directly who got back to me six hours later. At the open lab, Scott tried to fix my blog based on what GitHub’s help department had told me the error was, but GitHub was wrong so Scott emptied my blog so we could start from scratch. After he did this, my blog wouldn’t come up at all, and I was especially frustrated and disappointed that I had done my work only to not be able to post it. I felt like someone in the situation of the slacker despite not slacking off at all on the reading or writing. Scott was even ready to throw in the towel and contact GitHub himself when David miraculously saw that one line of code in my config.yml was missing my username. I hadn’t touched this since we originally set it up in class so I have no idea why my username was absent from a single line of code in the config.yml. Fortunately, once I put my username back in, my blog was up and I could post just fine. I am grateful to both Scott and David for helping me with this aggravating situation, and I hope I never experience this issue again.

Diana mentioned in her coding post for this week that working with other classmates on these projects is a soothing and constructive benefit in the midst of what is often a stressful and confusing activity. I know a few acquaintances who are professional engineers, and they all speak of getting tunnel vision on their projects where they get so focused on one aspect of something they are working on that they can’t see other mistakes right in front of them. Probably every person in our class experiences that when they are working on the dailies. The nice thing about working with other people on the coding assignments is that one person might think to check something that the other person or people didn’t think to do. Kelly, Diana, and I worked on our dailies today, and at several points when we were stuck and our work wouldn’t come up in Chrome I had us double check the JavaScript console and sure enough each time we had some kind of error in it. For me, being able to contribute something is a rewarding feeling, and it lets me know that I am learning even if the process feels slow and draining.