…I don’t always seem to solve them the same way as Rick shows us.
The three lines of code shown here with the ‘TODO:’ comments are how I solved the challenge, but Rick’s solution does the same thing with only one line of code. Rick’s line of code is the one that is commented out.
I guess I’m getting a little better though, as I’m sometimes able to finish a challenge before Rick’s explanation.
No worries! You are slowly getting the grasp and that’s the goal. There are lots of solutions and it is okay if you did not get the solution just like Rick.
Thank you! Of course, I’ve also been reading a lot of the legacy posts, like when someone asked why we did or didn’t cache a reference and things like that. It’s all starting to make a lot more sense.
I don’t feel bad about anything. I’m really happy that I’m starting to pick things up a little faster after all this time.
It’s crazy to think how it took me months to just get the idea of classes and methods. It’s been quite the journey over the past few years.
I started with an Udemy class about Android Studio and Java just because I knew I could make that work on my Linux computer. I did about 1/2 of that course and made a few apps, but things still didn’t make a lot of sense. I got really hung up when I was trying to make my own app that had some modal windows and I couldn’t figure out how to handle certain things between some classes. Methods were starting to make sense, but I still wasn’t getting the hang of access modifiers. The instructor would take a different approach for each app and it really confused me. Like, on one app he would build the UI first, and another app he would write the logic then build the UI later, etc. I understand that he was trying to show us many different ways to do the same thing, but I think I was just trying to move too fast through the course and spinning myself around in circles. Of course, back then I was very desperate to quit working at that pizza plant, so I was trying to rush my education and I wasn’t learning as much as I could have been.
Then I got into some C# classes, and they were good, but I was really getting hung up on the exercises where that instructor tried combining too many things. I wasn’t getting the ideas of parsing and casting.
Then I started my GameDev courses and those were a lot of fun. I built several projects, but lost them all in various HDD crashes, an OS crash, and software reloads. I was also running into some weird issues with Unity that were frustrating to me.
Then a job opened up in my town for a JavaScript/React developer and I tried for that. I ended up getting a job teaching kids how to program some games with Scratch and Unity, and some web and app development with JavaScript and React. I really liked JavaScript and fell in love with type coercion, which largely solved my problems with parsing and casting, but I was having a lot of trouble with React and getting the hang of components, API’s, asynchronous operations, and a bunch of other ES6 stuff. In reality though, I was trying to learn too many different languages and I would get confused about a lot of stuff and I wasn’t really good at building anything at all. My boss was too busy to mentor me and I felt really scatterbrained about everything I was trying to do.
To be a good web/app developer is so much more than getting good at HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and a framework like React/React Native. The idea of a ‘tech stack’ was, literally, any language that the boss would throw at me.
After I left that job, I had a long think about what really makes me happy. I decided to push all that other stuff aside and come back to C# and Unity to focus on getting good at those two, instead of chasing ten rabbits and not catching anything. I feel better just starting all over again and working through the GameDev lessons from the beginning.
It blows my mind how many games I finished and lost, and consequently had nothing to show for them, so I’m making it a point to upload everything to my itch.io and github accounts now.
It’s been quite the journey, but I feel like I’m starting to get somewhere and the lessons are not quite as confusing as they once were. I feel like I might be able to have something short, but original on the market by the end of the year, and that is a rewarding feeling.
