Dateline 9-17-2016

Last night I finished the third part of my fourth Android app development assignment and I'm so happy my progress. As I mentioned in the past, two out of the three parts of the assignment are for self-imposed extra credit. At first, I was worried that all this extra work was overdoing it as it I was showing off for the instructor. 

There may be a little truth to that. For my first assignment, I did the bare minimum and got a mediocre response which wasn't discouraging but it wasn't as inspiring as hearing that my second assignment was one of the best that the instructor had seen from this course. After hearing that, I've been pushing hard for more praise and in doing so, I've found that I'm learning way more than I think I would by strictly sticking to the scope of the assignment. 

For example, I am very happy with what I came up with for the fist part of this current assignment. I'm sure I could have turned it in and probably would have passed. This would have allowed me to get through the next set of lessons so that I'd probably be on to my next assignment by now.

Instead, I added this second part of the assignment that not only solidified what I learned but also allowed me to implement changes to my method that I learned from mistakes made in part one. Not only did this second part go much quicker but my coding is a lot cleaner. I feel this will allow me to move forward and create higher quality apps without it feeling like I'm putting in extra work. So in theory, I feel like I'm taking more time now so that the advanced courses to come will go more smoothly.

Today I'm about to start this third part of the assignment, which is also self-imposed extra credit. I should be able to finish this by the end of the day but it is the weekend so I may fit in some slacking. Either way, I should definitely be done before I go to bed tomorrow night.

Now it's time to get to work some I can have something to share with you in the very near future.

Talk to you tomorrow,

- The Wicker Breaker