2.25h. I did a bit of writing this morning and some fun old coding tonight! I made a react component that grabs the list of lines from the MBTA and then writes them to the screen. Eventually I’d like to populate that list into a menu and let people select the line and direction and it will tell them the next scheduled train.

It’s useless currently (and potentially for ever), but juuuust close enough to being useful that it feels fun.

I read an article last night and listened to a developer tea podcast where they were talking about learning. I like the concept of being smart about how to learn, and consciously choosing to do specific things in order to increase retention. I’m really going to make a concerted effort to increase ‘play time’ and try to build in time to make tutorial projects better. I get disheartened sometimes when I get to the end of a class and feel like I’ve been led by the nose through the whole thing. Even if that does happen, the best thing I can do is to tinker with whatever I ended up making . I can figure out how to break it and possibly how to make it better. I tend to have a very black and white view of this process and I look down on “partial credit lessons”. I need to stop doing that, because some topics are too big to pick up in a few hours, and doing a few days or weeks of them is the only way to really understand them.

I love how so much of programming seems to be about managing frustration and failure. I consider myself to be really good at repeatedly hitting brick walls, but even I have a lot to learn about persistence and perseverance.