Wrap up

I've still been having a lot of trouble with these reflections. I talked to Ben about it, and he told me the story about a Team Liquid member who watched his replays after matches to learn about his style. I've been trying to somehow incorporate this into my thinking, but really I've come up with nothing. It's been in the back of my head for the past 2 weeks, too.

I look back at the semester and I'm trying to see what I did. I mean, I don't really learn by reading books or watching tutorials. I learn by just jumping in head first and trying stuff. I realize that this isn't the most effective method but it allows me to learn the best way: by making mistakes. I look up stuff as I need them. I talked to veterans of that language later to see if what I'm doing could be done better. This tends to lead to poor results early on, but I feel as if it allows me to understand the inner workings of the language better because I actually experience what's wrong. Instead of reading, "You should not parse primitive doubles as strings." I end up doing it anyway and find out the hard way which allows me to realize why and I end up imprinting into my brain with an actual experience behind it.

This semester has been a bit different. To get to a stage where I can get to trial-and-error I had to actually read some documentation. This is something I've started doing recently since I've tried to find easier solutions to easy problems, much like the permissions issue. You run the app for the first time and you have wrong permissions you're going to get some error and, rather than just claw at the program like a helpless kitten, I figured, "Oh hey, I bet the docs have something relevant here."

That being said, Javadocs have been worthless to me outside of finding return types. If I need help, I need examples. Late in April I found some built-in templates and functionality for something I was doing with custom adapters and what not. I figured it was in my best interest to use the optimized, packaged items rather than my clunky custom ones. I tried looking them up but to no avail. There is, I swear, no examples about it. You can find bits and pieces of it in the documentation but nothing meaningful outside the Javadocs. So I fell back on my old strategy of just ... plugging stuff in. This... kind of worked. It worked to the extent where it compiled but didn't run. At this stage I was frustrated already and simply gave up that idea.

This semester has kind of been a ... merging of ideas. It got to a point where I didn't need to look up anything because I knew either what I was doing would A) work, or B) not work. Towards the end of the semester it become less and less guesswork and more, "Yeah, that's not possible" or "Yeah, that should be possible." Save for the few, "Oh, how about that." moments where things happened that I didn't expect. Granted, I can't cite specific instances but that's how it feels. I understand the concept of Adapters now, which at the beginning I was just hacking stuff into it and seeing what would happen. I went from no adapter knowledge at all to making custom adapters.