This and That, On [My] Inheritance

This place rocks. While I can't claim to be an expert on the keyword 'this' or every difference and nuance between the four instantiation styles (functional, functional-shared, prototypal, and pseudoclassical), I definitely have a best grasp I've ever had on the topics. Perhaps in another post I'll lay out what I understand about them.

My partner and I have been sailing through the data structures sprint, which has us implementing (w/o using arrays) simple stacks, queues, linked lists, sets, hash tables, trees, binary search trees and graphs and some simple associated methods. I can't speak highly enough of how cool it's been to finally grok what these structures are, what they are good for, and (especially for achieving mastery), what they're bad at.

First Day Down

Hack Reactor is exactly as intense as you think it would be, if not in terms of content (since we're primarily reviewing some of the later precourse work), then in terms of sheer endurance required. 11 hours a day, 6 days a week is no joke, and if you're not in tune with your own needs, you definitely run the risk of burning out.

Having said that, I cannot wait for tomorrow. Marcus spent a good time today differentiating between the different strategies we could employ to rewrite a basic version of a very popular browser-based recursive function, using the analogy of telling classmates to write down the names of those around them wearing red shirts on a notepad:

1. telling each classmate to write the names on a public notepad is akin to storing your recursion results in a global var, which means that you can only call the function once before having to instantiate a new var or clean out the old one. 
2. Marcus creating a notepad and passing it to the first classmates (to be passed along afterwards) would be like creating a top level var within your function and calling a subroutine to do all of the recursion (my previous preference and go-to strategy).
3. The third has each classmate write their own notepad of names and pass the notepad up to the classmate who passed the instructions, concatenating them with the caller's notepads every step of the way until you get to Marcus, who just returns the notepad. It took me a while to finally wrap my head around it (which is not to say that if you asked me to write this tomorrow, I would do it successfully), but I think I have a much more solid grasp on recursion than at any point in the last year, so there's that. 

Hopefully that made sense but if it doesn't, well whatever, its 11:13PM after my first day and I'm tired as hell. 

'Twas The Night Before Hack Reactor

So tomorrow begins the rest of my life. To satisfy a necessary requirement of the program, I set up this blog. Hopefully though, that won't be the only reason why I maintain it. As I get more comfortable with what I learn and teach myself, I will [ideally] develop a voice and a purpose for contributing here, and will hopefully be able to distill and share more useful, more relevant and easier-to-comprehend-and-digest ideas and information.

But don't hold your breath, this could take a while.