Brush Yourself Off: Week 05
Finding My Balance
This week was tough. I wanted to prove to myself that I could finish a Level 2 Assignment despite the AI and other students telling me these contained some senior level complexity. “That’s 3-4 layers of abstraction at once,” it said. “You’re trying to solve five puzzles at once, while writing code cleanly enough to pass tests - That’s a senior-level compositional skill,” it said. Each time I wanted to beat it like an extra hard Dark Souls boss. I didn’t care and I wanted to win. “Surely I can just brute force it,” I said to myself.
AI even told me to stop at one point, lol.
“Before I help you debug, I want to check in: you’ve been working on this assignment for a while now. How are you feeling? Are you getting frusterated? - Claude
With the help of the instructor’s advice I decided to take a break and try and build something, anything instead. At first I focused on using AI tools because that’s what the intention for that week was, but I wanted to build something on my own without AI. I wanted to regain some confidence I’d lost in the last 2 weeks full of tricky evals.
I wanted to try my hand at building a Raycast extension since I had no experience building something besides a ‘web app.’ I focused on two things:
- something I’m passionate about (music)
- something smaller and less daunting in scope
The intention was to focus on the act of building within the moment rather than focusing on the outcome. Within three days I had more fun and felt more joy than the previous 4 days of the week.
What I Built
“You can contact a third-party agency and pay for an article about yourself in Forbes.” - Oobah Butler, BBC Journalist (the article)
Within 3 days I had a working Raycast extension tested and deployed. I also accomplished another goal of mine coming into this program: to contribute to Open Source Software. I’m amazed at how they designed their API to accept React and compile it into Apple’s UIKit for native OSX apps. I didn’t have to worry about React Native or learning a whole new framework. I learned more about the CI/CD process which was one of my goals for this program too.