So, after getting stymied by the third problem on the Lambda School Challenge yesterday, I stayed up all night and worked through nearly the entire JavaScript part of the pre-course again. I didn’t run through the last two sections, because by that time, it was 7:30 AM and I had to stay with the baby while my wife got ready for work. I work from home the majority of the time, so I’m also essentially a stay-at-home dad a lot too.

While working through the whole thing, I created a cheat sheet as I went, with small programming examples of everything that was being covered, so that I’d have them handy to reference formats as needed. Its 2 pages long right now, and I think that when I add the last two topics, it’ll be a full 3 pages.

I saw that time was approaching, so I tried retaking the challenge at around 6:00 AM, but found that I couldn’t. You can only attempt the challenge once per day, but it doesn’t reset at midnight – its once every 24 hours, so I had to wait until around 8:45 to try again.

The time came. The baby woke up and I had her grandparents watch her while I locked myself in the office and drew up my cheat sheets, ready for battle. It was worse this time. All three questions were things that hadn’t been covered in class. I had to go to Google for help with all of them.

The first challenge asked for me to modify a function to return the number of a certain set of letters in a string. We didn’t cover anything like this in the pre-course. I had to find a way to identify only the letters asked for in the string, count them, and then return that value. I ended up Googling the question and found an answer online, which I modified and made work with the function I was given.

It felt like I was cheating, because the process and code weren’t really my own. I can understand why people experience impostor syndrome when coding. I also felt like I had been cheated, because other than being able to follow the format necessary to modify a function, this wasn’t something that had been covered in the pre-course, so it wasn’t something I’d spent the last 2 weeks actually sitting down and learning. It really feels like everything I studied was for nothing, since I’m not being asked to use any of that knowledge.

The next challenge asked me to modify a function to return a number in a particular size category in a given array. Again, this wasn’t something that had been covered in class. I was forced to rely on Google again, and not the material from the pre-course. This ended up being a one-line solution, which amazed me. It also used a type of command with all punctuation and no letters, which I’ve never seen before. And yes, it was disheartening to know that 2/3 of the test so far were on things that weren’t in the pre-course. They might as well have asked me to duplicate the reflection of a painting in the pupil of the eye of a subject in a Flemish painting. It was equally covered in the pre-course.

Ok. So, with two of the questions answered – more by w3schools and Stack Overflow than me – I moved on to the third. Lo and behold: a question about a topic which hadn’t been covered in the pre-course. That. Never. Happens. At least, not to me…

Ok. I had a little more than 15 minutes left to solve this riddle. Load an array and put something they gave me into a certain part of it – not a part explicitly identified by the index in the array either, and it had to work with 3 different arrays that, of course, had different items in it.

Google. w3schools. Mozilla Developer Network. Stack Overflow. By their powers combined, I was able to come up with a solution – that didn’t work. Onscreen, it looked like it should work. The syntax was right. When I tested each individual element, they returned the right data on the screen. The output was all undefined. I focused. I made changes, even though they didn’t look like they’d make a difference. They didn’t. I reviewed the articles on the websites and comments. Everyone was using the same format as me. They were getting the right results. I was getting undefined. The clock ticked down. I was reading documentation about the new command that I was certain could do the job. I checked the tab with the challenge: 4..3..2..1. Out of Time.

I kind of want to write pseudo-code to replace time with my mind and revise the close of that last paragraph. But yeah. I failed again. Its really annoying that we’re being tested on something that we’re not being taught. I can understand it a little, because at work we’re faced with unique problems that need research to solve every week. Its not novel to this challenge. What is, is having to do it three times in a row in a 45 minute period.

But yeah, this, too, shall pass.

So, after bombing the last question again, I went to the Slack and asked if anyone could look at my code and help me understand why it didn’t work. I didn’t post anything about the actual problem, and asked that it be done via private message, so it doesn’t influence anyone else who’s taking the challenge. For the most part, I got people telling me that they can’t help with the challenge, until they understood that I wasn’t asking for help with a live challenge – I was asking for a code review for something that wasn’t working so that I could understand it.

One person did private message me, and he ended up being really helpful. He didn’t point out explicitly what the issue was, but after the two of us analyzed it, and he did some outside research, he helped me think through it and we found the issue. My implementation of the new command was fine – but that command had a behavior that wasn’t documented in any of the resources that I’d gone through in my rush to solve the problem. If I’d had more time, I’d probably have caught it, but ultimately, the command would update the array, which was fine, but then it basically held the value of whatever was removed from the array – which in this case, was nothing. So, it was supplying me with nothing (hence, undefined) in my answer when I returned its data outside of the function.

It took about an hour, but after we discovered that behavior, I figured out that I should return the array itself, not the update from the new command. I had copied the challenge problem into repl.it, so I could work on it after the challenge, and I finally got it to return the right answers after learning about that behavior – which none of the commentors on Stack or anywhere else mentioned.

So, I learned something about programming, and I learned something about frustration and perseverance and human aid.

I’ll try again tomorrow. If I don’t pass the challenge by noon (Pacific) on Thursday, I don’t qualify for the August 5th cohort. If that happens, I’ll work on it daily over the summer and see if I can qualify for the September cohort. I don’t have high hopes of passing, but it gives me an extra month to learn on my own. My sister’s getting married in early September, so maybe this will actually turn out to be better, schedule-wise.

I’m looking for that silver lining.