Day[26] Flying Solo

Long day.

The last two lectures have concerned the method for accessing databases through our code using an intricate series of classes and functions. We were in pairs during the exercises, the same pairs as last week, so I was with Diane once more.

We fell a little behind yesterday, as I had a scheduled meeting with Caitie about the Pathway Program and Diane had a hard out at 4:00. We planned to catch up today.

The exercises assigned today were designed around building integrated tests (think unit tests, but for the code/database hybrids) for the code that we wrote in pairs the day before. Diane and I had a long day ahead of us as we had to catch up and then work on the new stuff.

Diane fell ill and left right after the lecture. I planned on finishing the exercises from yesterday and then getting as far as I could on the integrated tests. But, as often happens, things didn’t go as planned.

I got hung up several times on Monday’s exercises. Not wanting to dilly-dalley, I hit up Tom as much as I could with questions to keep moving forward. By the time I (sort of) finished the Monday exercises, it was nearly 4:00. I had spent three hours catching up. I worked until 5:30, but I was fried.

Everyone was having trouble with the integrated testing. It’s incredibly complicated (or, at least, it seems so right now) and when you try to follow the problem through the debugger, it doesn’t work like it does when you’re dealing with straight code. There are too many dependencies, too many places for mistakes to happen. It’s hard to narrow down.

The second Capstone begins tomorrow. The grains of the hourglass are decrementing rapidly on my time for integrated testing.

I was able to get double the reps in on the coding portion of the database and code integration, so that was good. And I did enough of the testing to feel somewhat comfortable with it, but I don’t see how Diane and I can catch up and turn in a finished product. We have hours upon hours of work that still need done. This looks like a moment where we take a subpar grade and move on. We’ll see how tomorrow goes.