I was blocked on sooooo many occasions while doing the kata challenges. Each time you do one, your skills are meant to get ever so slightly better. Repetition of these task is what will drill into how to solve issues. In saying that, I found that although I have completed all the mandatory kata challenges, I am not feeling very satisfied or rewarded. I had a massive problem with not being able to resolve the kata challenges in a very timely manner. A lot of it might be due to misunderstanding, lack of knowledge and my brain not functioning, essentially like I hit a brick wall. I felt bad while doing the challenges, something that I might have been able to resolve earlier on in my studying journey I was not able to resolve in a timely manner. There was a lot of googling involved and a lot of testing, checking test scripts, writing new pseudocode, talking through the problem as if I was talking to a duck. Some of these techniques did help me. Specifically, there was one issue where I had to capitalize the first letter of every word in a sentence. This should be an extremely easy kata to do. I spent about 3 hours or more on it… It really did put me down a bit. I’m not sure how much I learned from these kata challenges because I kept thinking about how long it’s taking me to do the challenge that I don’t get time to reflect on what I just learnt how to do. It’s a real shame. Maybe I need to slow myself down a bit.
I think I did well on the fizzbuzz/super-fizzbuzz challenges. Because I was familiar with the modulus operator from other challenges in the past I knew what to do. It was just a matter of putting it all into code. My pseudo code I made for this was almost spot on. The only real problem I had was getting the super-fizzbuzz challenges case insensitive ‘buzz’ word being recognized. I ended up using a regex expression to solve it. That was the part that took the longest probably. I learnt through this challenge that the pseudocode really does work. It’s good to have a plan in place and work with it. I also found in one of my codes when I was trying to figure out why doesn’t it work.. I started talking to myself and explaining what I was trying to do, next thing I knew I managed to solve the problem. This challenge was one of the only ones that I felt a little bit good about.
I’m confident in using all the different type of techniques to problem solve. The issue is even though I may use all the different techniques, I’m not always understanding the code and what’s being asked. Sometimes the wording of the problem to resolve catches me and I go down the wrong rabbit-hole.
I was reluctant to ask for help at every point in this challenge. Every challenge I did I attempted on my own and due to that there were parts that maybe I could have done faster had I asked for help. But I think the issue I have is that I’m not able to explain things very clearly to people, quite possibly because I don’t understand the issue at hand. So, I hesitate asking anyone for assistance and just keep attempting it on my own. I should probably ask people for help, this will help me also get better at understanding something and also will be able to get help on something I am stuck on.