Dateline 7-9-2016

Due to the events of the week, I wasn't really in the mood to write anything thing yesterday but life did have to go on. I spent the rest of the day working on my Android app building course that I'm having extreme mixed feelings about.

I love the class. The instructor is great and the content is very useful. The problem I'm having has nothing to do with the course and more to do with how fast technology is changing. Even though this course is pretty new, a lot of the content is already outdated leading each lesson to take twice as long to complete as I have to sort through the differences.

Okay, so it doesn't happen with every lesson but it happens enough to be frustrating and cause these mixed feelings. For example, in Android Studio (the software used to build apps) the program will automatically populate lines of code in certain situations.

Every once in a while, this auto-code will have subtle changes from the version the instructor when he created the video. So, you can follow the example line for line, only to that your code doesn't work. You then watch the video over and over again to see where you went wrong only to find that you need to change one word in your code to match a word that has changed in the auto-code since the course was created.

Here's an example. Sometime in the auto-code from when the course was created, they would use a full word and in the new auto-code they just use the initial. This is such a subtle change that it can feel like hunting for a needle in a haystack if you're not given a heads up. 

There are serval other tiny differences in the main software as well as the supplemental software due to version updates that are just different enough to drive a person crazy. 

The other thing that sucks is that the instructor must get a billion questions about these changes making the question section kind of hard to navigate. The instructors solution is often to Google search the solution and there are often several confusing solutions offered by students that ran into the same problem. This leads to more mixed feelings because though I am frustrated by the whole thing, I also understand.

Oh well, hopefully, I can finish this thing off in the next week or two because I'm feeling ready to move on to the next course I need to move on to my real world projects.

As always, I will keep you posted on my progress and talk to you tomorrow with updates.

- The Wicker Breaker