I did. I really did have a good work day!
I had one of those, whatchacallit, flow states.

What I learnt in Django land

  • I learnt nothing!
  • Well I learnt nothing new. I spent the whole day and what little I time I had yesterday, trying to crack the assignment for module three of the course.
  • I struggled and struggled and then, struggled a bit more.
  • The more I write Django, the more intuitive it feels, like I can never make out, what’s provided by Python and what has been built for me by Django. It all feels like one seamless whole.
  • The blow up Django cycle continued today, to an extreme, it felt like. But it felt good and iterative, like I had a sandbox to play in, as I wished.
  • There’d be a decimal error and I’d fix it and then there’d be some sort of bounds error because I’d built too little capacity to hold stuff in my models and I’d go fix it and then I’d figure that this method returns a tuple, so I need to catch it in two variables and throw one away, just so I could have at the data I was interested in, and I learnt how to rebuild my models and migrations and reset my database and I spent two exasperating hours on a consistent Django blowup that just should not have been possible. And then I realised, I was assigning the same data to two models (same variable.) Long story short, I learned a lot.
  • Working over the past two days reminded me of this Julia Evans page, that I serendipitously came across a while ago.
![Julia Evans comic explaining the importance of tracking progress][jeiln]

Focus Follow Up aka Flow what?

  • This probably, was the first time, I had a state of flow while programming (I used to have them all the time at work as well lots of times, when I am writing).
  • This probably means I am comfortable with the level I am at, and I should stretch a bit more.
  • Did eleven, 30 minute sessions with no aborts. I lost track of time, quite a bit.
  • Am done with three out of the four modules of this course, I’m on.
  • After yesterday, today’s progress really feels good.
  • While I’ll take my wins where I can find them, I should be cognizant of the fact that it was the uncomfortable practice of the week that brought me here.
  • And so, I want to get more comfortable with feeling uncomfortable.

Here’s to finishing strong!

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