End of Week 1 11/20/24

I started officially Wednesday, November 13th. It is now Wednesday night on the 20th. In the beginning, I wrote a personal manifesto to lay out my reasons for starting and my plans for the project. The long and short of it was summarized in the intro above. With the help of my dad, I assembled the parts of a LEGO Mindstorms kit we had from several years before. After that, we got started on setting up my GitHub repository and this blog. To do so, Jekyll had to be installed. I’ve got to be honest, I knew Jekyll from Jekyll and Mr. Hyde before this project. Now I can say I have tapped the surface of the deep lake that Jekyll is. Along with that I of course used the terminal, that odd application with the daunting black screen and forbidding empty line block. Git is a not-so-self-explanatory application. It will take me awhile to get the hang of that, but thankfully I have the time. On the more tangible side, we got our first program running on the robot. With a sensor held up to my bright green shirt, the dutiful thing knew to move forward. It has been a week primarily made of setup, but I am not discouraged or quitting. That is more than can be said for a younger me.

Big takeaways (from memory):

-Jekyll is a framework that uses ruby to convert markdown to html. Markdown is what I am using now as I type this. It is basically english from my current viewpoint

-Git is source control application. Source control is the process of creating repositories and tracking change to code. Through Git I was able to connect VS Code to my repository. And, I no longer have to enter my username/password when making changes. How convienent

-Learning is a process. Impatience has been a problem with my method of learning in the past. When I was young, if something didn’t come to me quickly, I was much more likely to give up or assume I couldn’t do it. I have grown in that way, as I am more patient (scratch that–more aware of my impatience) and can acurately assess things easier.

Quote of the Week

I may not do this every week, but I feel like it this time. My dad keeps saying “the obstacle is the way.” I thought about this, noted its elegance, and soon forgot it. The next day, however, I was struggling in my chemistry class. I was frustrated because I had misunderstood a concept in class and didn’t know why. I decided to go home and throughly review my notes. I was able to make a connection which deeped my understanding of the concept and solved my problem, and in that moment the quote came back to me. Mistakes and obstacles are remembered much easier than the times we figure things out without a problem. When we have them, we also remember the process to solve them and what the solution was. Obstacles make us better learners. Very cool quote brought up by Dad.