A couple of posts ago I talked about how a lab was really hard to do. Good thing it was, it got me ready to do the real work, which was assignment 1.
In this assignment we’re making a timetable app. Nothing too fancy really, just a couple of layouts backed by data in SQLite. But man, that took a lot of work to finish.
I’ve got it done on time, but I was only able to because I started well in advance. Due date was friday. On thursday I spent a few hours on it. On friday I got up at 6 to invigilate a test at 8. Basically all day that day, from 8:00 to 23:30 I’ve spent labouring on this thing.
In retrospective I don’t even know why it took this long. There is no rocket science in any of it. The one semi-fancy feature I added (swipe gesture detection) I’ve done the week before. This was just many cycles like:
- identify work to do
- find example online or in course notes
- think the solution through as much as possible
- implement it
- test it
- fix it
- at some point above: fix any cascading effects the changes had
At no point did I feel that I ran into a dead end, or found any major surprise. I was even pretty confident most of the way that I’ll be done in time. I took a 2 hour nap in the middle of the day because my brain stopped working, but I was sure I’d get up and finish the job. It was just long, hard work.
Luckily I am pretty excited about this project (the assignment is hopefully the seed of a greater thing) and I’m still committed to learning Android this semester. So it was both fun and rewarding. I can’t wait to get assignment 2 done!