Dateline 7-12-2016

My love/hate relationship with my current Android App class continues on. Last night I spent about six hours to complete a 30-minute class. The problem is a pile-up of conflicts caused by the rapid development of app building technology. The class isn't even that old and it is already very out of date.

The first half of the class wasn't that bad. Since we were dealing with the basics of the languages involved in app building everything worked because these languages didn't have to interact and would work in any code writing software that supported the specific syntax. There were a few tiny issues with how these languages interacted with the app build tool but these early issues were easily resolved.

Now I'm up to learning more advanced apps that are more interactive and require backend codes. The problem is, the key piece of software to create the databases needed for the course has gone the way of the dodo and though there is an alternative, things don't always work the same.

I'm finding that I have to fudge the numbers to get the app building software to work from earlier builds, to compensate for replacement software and outdated codes. Even though I'm technically using the older version, the software still uses the latest information when auto-populating code. 

I often find I will do something like, add an activity, which usually works just fine but when building a Frankenapp the software itself will implement invalid codes and then yell at me that I did something wrong.

I've tried using the student forums to figure things out but it's filled with chaos from similar problems but different solutions depending on the time of the post. Some people have problems from when the class matched the available technology at the time the course was developed while other have issues from different builds.

There have been so many changes so soon that the instructors only advice seems to be to look it up, which I'm sure is useful but I'm so new to the game I don't always know what to ask or how to interpret the solution as software developers tend to speak in extremely technical terms.

Though this course is taking far longer than it would if everything matched up, I do feel like I'm learning as much about problem-solving as I'm learning about app development. Either way, as frustrating as this has been I really love the potential of what I am learning and can't wait to move on to real world project and hopefully start a career.

And with that...

It's time to get to work!!!

Talk to you tomorrow,

- The Wicker Breaker