wdi_survival_guide.md

WDI Guidelines for Survival

1. PRESS ENTER.

   • To get the most from this course, you'll have to let go of your fear of being wrong. So press enter and run your program. The worst that can happen is you get an error, and in Ruby, errors tell you what to correct. So run your programs early and often. Press enter.

2. When you feel bad about your progress or level of understanding, remember that to become good at anything, you first have to be terrible, and the only way to stop being terrible is to keep going. So keep going.

3. Do the smallest Next Thing.

   • Don't read the whole exercise or homework (especially when it's given in parts) and try to plan out how to build the entire thing! Read the first bit of the assignment, and then proceed to get that part working. Only then should you move on. Even simple exercises will become overwhelming if you try to tackle the whole thing at once.

4. Assume nothing.

   • You might think you know what your program is doing, but if your program is breaking, you don't. So don't leave it to chance. Use a debugger or some carefully placed logging to check every value on every line if you have to.

5. When confused, write exactly what you need your program to do in English.

   • Because if you can't write it in English, you certainly can't write it in code.

6. Collaborate.

   • This is the one time of your life in which you have 3 months to devote every waking hour to learning programming with people of the same level of understanding. So honor that and collaborate with your classmates. You'd be amazed how many times a classmate's explanation will ring true for you in a way that an experienced programmer's will not, because your classmates will speak from the same knowledge base, where an experienced programmer can sometimes forget what it is to not know.
   • Similarly, if you do feel you understand something, volunteer your help to a struggling classmate. You'd be amazed at how much you can learn by articulating concepts you (think you) understand to those who are unfamiliar or confused by them.

7. If you ever reach the point where you brain feels like it's seizing up/eating itself, you need to stop coding for at least 20 minutes. Start by closing your laptop. Your mind is tethered to the open screen, so you need to close it to recover your sanity. Then remove yourself from the area; take a walk and listen to several songs you have a strong emotional response to. If after 20 minutes your brain still doesn't work, keep walking.

8. Go to bed.

   • As a former student, I know how tempting it can be to keep working until 12:30 or 1:00 in the morning, but doing so only hurts your ability to learn the following day. You need at least 6 hours of sleep a night to perform at a high level, so go to bed.

I would add: do the small version. Don't read the whole exercise or homework (especially when it's given in parts) and try to plan out howto build the whole thing! Read the first part, then stop, then get that working, then move on. That's how programming works, and even simple exercises become overwhelming if you don't tackle them in parts!