Monthly Archives: November 2014

Impostor Syndrome

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Was reading this article about being a beginning female programmer today and I began to feel incredibly depressed. This is something I could have easily written a year ago. I still write quite a lot about how incredibly difficult it is to break into the tech industry.

One reason I don’t necessarily talk about a lot of sexism in tech is because, back when I was starting out, I didn’t know if I wasn’t finding opportunity because I was a woman or because I had no experience. I had an acquaintance go on Twitter and ask why, whenever he posted a job opportunity, no women ever applied for it. I asked him if he would be willing to hire a woman with less than three years of professional experience. His response was a horrified, “Oh god, no!”

Many people enter the tech industry because we keep hearing the desperate plea of companies for more tech workers, but once many of us get here, we realize there is a giant ravine between us and the people who claim they want to hire us.

I recently wrote a blog post about the incredible dearth of opportunity from the various places that claim they can find no workers. I run a CocoaHeads group combined with an NSCoder group for student entirely to try to help them navigate their way to their first jobs. I am doing this because I am not too far removed from the period of my life where I had no fucking clue how I was going to break into tech.

I recently attended CocoaConf in Boston. I went there last year. When I went last year, I was asked by several people what I was going to do when I got home. I told them I honestly had no clue. Everything I had worked for that year was to make it to that conference to take the Core Audio workshop and maybe network with some people. But you know what, that conference was a catalyst for my career.

One of the speakers there, Josh Smith, got me invited to speak at CocoaConf in Chicago back in March. He also was willing to help me try and submit a book pitch to a publisher. I made friends with Chris Adamson there, so when he was looking for a coauthor for his book, he reached out to me.

I can be a sanctimonious prig and go on here and talk about how I worked my ass off trying to learn programming and how I earned/deserve all of my current success, but that isn’t entirely true. I had parents with enough money to help me pay for going to Boston. I got my husband to send me to the first CocoaConf I went to even though that one didn’t immediately pay off.

I have tried very hard to make opportunities happen for myself and I have done my best to exhaust each and every one that I have gotten. I have had a few opportunities that I have massively fucked up. I have tried my best to learn from those and hope that another one will come along that I won’t massively fuck up.

I see people who are given opportunities that squander them because they don’t really understand what they are being given. I scream in my head at these people. They make my brain hurt. They make me feel like crying. Not only are they wasting their opportunity, they are also training the person who gave them that opportunity to stop doing that because people flake out on them. It really sucks.

I wish I could just say that I leaned in and that I made the most of my opportunities and feel proud of how far I have come in the last year, but I have to acknowledge the uncomfortable reality that I got opportunities other people haven’t and I have simply followed through with them where other people have not. It’s a nice story to say I worked hard, but it isn’t right to tell other people that if they do the same thing that stuff will work out for them, because I am honestly shocked that it has worked out for me.

So, thank you to all the people who gave me a chance and lent me a hand. I hope that you will continue to do so for other people in the future and I pray that someday I will be able to do the same as well.

A Brief Analysis of Swift Structures and Classes

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Now that I have cleared a few things from my queue, I have some time and mental energy to really delve into some of the things I left on my back burner. One of those things is to really dive deeply into Swift.

Yes, I know. I have my name on a book using Swift. That book isn’t a language book, it is a framework book. We are primarily getting people who code familiar with the Cocoa Touch frameworks that most people will use. We did not really dive deeply into the minutiae of the Swift Language because, honestly, very few people have. It is still in the process of changing and many people are still stuck in the mental paradigm that they are supposed to write it like they would Objective-C.

I knew when I was going to learn Swift that I really wanted to grok in fullness how best to use the language and to not write hacked, inefficient, and messy code.

One thing I am trying to get used to is the fact that a file does not have to have a class. I am so used to the idea that every file must not only have a class, but that the class must have the same name as the file that seeing it is possible to write a file without that and have it compile kind of blows my mind.

This begs the question in my mind of what do you, or should you, need to include in a file that integrates into your project. Right now I am focusing on three different structures: classes, structs, and enums. I want to explore what each of them gives you and what their limitations are. These are three very similar things and I am interested in exploring what situations each would work it.

This post will be on structures and classes and a future post will be on enums.

Class Versus Structure

Classes have all the same functionality that structures have, but this does not go the other way around. Classes and structures can both do the following:

  • Define properties
  • Define methods
  • Define subscripts to provide access using subscript syntax
  • Define initializers
  • Be extended and expanded
  • Conform to protocols

Structures are far more powerful here in Swift than they were back in the Objective-C days. Back in the day structures could pretty much just do the first thing in this list, define properties. Structures have taken on some of the heavy lifting that only classes used to do.

Classes, on the other hand, can do all of these things along with the following:

  • Inherit characteristics
  • Check and interpret the class type through type casting
  • Deinitialize resources
  • Allow more than one reference to the class instance

This kind of begs the question of why you would create a struct if you can get all the functionality of one for “free” by creating a class. What are the advantages of a struct? Why did the Swift development team think it was necessary to supercharge the struct type?

We would of course want to create a struct in the same situations we used to use them before. But if a struct can conform to a protocol, be extended, and define methods, then where is the line between a class and a struct?

One of the things in this list confused me somewhat: ”Define subscripts to provide access using subscript syntax.” I am perusing the Apple documentation and apparently this means that if you instantiate a struct in a class, you can directly set one property inside the struct. I didn’t use structs much when I was learning Objective-C, but I vaguely remember if you created an instance of a struct, like CGRect, you had to set both aspects of the CGRect. You couldn’t create a CGRect that was a square, change your mind, and just reset the length to be longer. You had to reset the height as well. Now if you wanted to do that, you could simply specify the parameter you want to change and reset it directly.

Value Types

Structures and enums are both value types, but classes are not. A value type is a type whose value is copied when you assign it or pass it around. I didn’t know this, but all the types that we use in Swift, like integers, Boolians, and strings, are all actually implemented as structures. I am so used to dealing with these “primitive” data types that I never thought about how they get implemented by the compiler. I find it fascinating that all the types we use in Swift boil down to structures.

I guess if you really think about what the code is doing, this makes total sense. We are not using C pointers in Swift. If you create a CGRect and then create a second one that is set to the same initial value as the first one, your second CGRect can change and mutate independently of the first CGRect.

Reference Types

Classes are reference types. This means that if you create an instance of a class then set another instance of the same class to the first instance, they are linked and what affects one will affect the other. This is a really important distinction between a class and a structure. If you have something where you will need to create a lot of instances of that object, but you want them to display slightly different behavior, you would want to use a structure. Likewise, if you want a lot of instances that will all change when one changes, you would use a class.

So When Do I Use A Structure?

Here is Apple’s advice about when you would want to use a structure. They advise you do to so if at least three of the following conditions apply:

  • You are encapsulating a few relatively simple data values
  • Your values must be copied rather than referenced when they are passed around
  • Any properties in the structure are value types, or if you are not storing instances of classes
  • The structure does not need to inherit properties or behaviors from an existing type

This list is…interesting…

The problem I am having here is that this is pretty much what you could do with structures back in C and Objective-C. What was the point of really increasing the scope of what they can do just to advise everyone to treat them like they did before. This puzzles me. I thought by exploring these differences that I would uncover something I hadn’t considered before, but I am left with my initial questions.

It’s possible I am reading too much into this. Being an Apple developer means sifting through everything Apple says to try and read the tea leaves of what direction they are going in next. Sometimes they leave a decent trail of breadcrumbs. Sometimes they don’t.

I am in the parallel process of learning Haskell along with Swift. I am going to keep these questions in the back of my mind to see if I can find any more answers to this question in other locations. I feel there is something significant here I haven’t gleaned yet, and I am looking forward to figuring out what it is.

Conclusion

I hope for this to be the first in a series of posts about the Swift programming language and how to work with it most effectively. I am probably not telling anyone anything they couldn’t figure out from reading Apple’s Swift book. I have found that writing things out as I am learning them is helpful to my own learning process. If my writing is helpful to you as well, awesome.

Janie’s Insanity Log: Saturday, November 8, 2014

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Time: 7:45 am
Tea: Adagio 4 Seasons: Autumn
Current Music: Soundtrack to Revolutionary Girl Utena

Hello. Over the last month or so people ask me what I am going to do this weekend and I invariably say that I am trying to finish my book. I always get the same response: “Wait, you’re still working on that thing??”

Yes. I am still working on that thing.

I am tired of working on that thing. I want it out of my life and into the hands of people who will use it for its intended purpose of chaos and destruction.

Problem is that when I try to make myself sit down and write, I want to be anywhere other than in front of my computer. I start crawling the walls and try to gnaw my own arm off to escape.

So, I am going to the super counterintuitive thing of writing my thoughts down to avoid having to write my thoughts down. I am going to periodically write my mental state here over the next 48 hours or so so that I can share my psychological degradation with the rest of the world. Yay!

This will either be entertaining or it will be a disturbing, incoherent rambling mess. Or, if I am lucky, it will be both! Let’s see what happens.

Time: 7:55 am

I have realized that my chapter goals may have been overly ambitious. I have chosen three frameworks that could each justify their own book. This is a poor decision. I have removed one framework altogether and I am now figuring out how to adequately write the rest of the chapter.

I made the somewhat impulsive decision yesterday to go to CoocaConf Boston to spend some time with Chris working on the book. I started a job a few months ago where I can actually talk to another programmer about the issues I am having and it has increased my productivity tremendously.

One reason this has been taking so long is that life has gotten in the way. It’s been hard to say I am going to sit in front of my computer and write about something I am still figuring out when it has been nice and sunny outside and I would rather be doing other things. Having another person there to bounce ideas off of and who knows you are supposed to be working because they are in the same boat is an invaluable thing. We have been limping along this way out of necessity, but I really need to work with Chris in person, so I am sacrificing some of my royalties in order to make sure the project gets done the way I want it to be done.

Time: 8:00 am

Realized I am spending time I should not chatting on Twitter about what a cool idea this post is and all the awesome crap I am going to do with it. Gently directing my attention back to the task I have to do.

Time: 8:05 am

Reconnoitering the task at hand. I am trying to figure out the best way to proceed here. I have an idea about what I want to talk about and what project I want to complete by the end of the chapter. I know that some amount of the chapter is going to be structural stuff and the rest will be what Chris likes to call, “clicky-draggy” stuff of explaining how to set things up and show actual code.

I don’t want to work on coding the project by myself because I want to work with the person who has done a lot of the work on the code, which is why I am going to Boston. However, I don’t think I will get very much done if I don’t at least begin to explain some of the “clicky-draggy” stuff.

I found a project very similar to the one I want to explain by the end of the chapter. I am tentatively planning to throw code in the chapter that I will tag to remove when I replace it with the actual code I am creating for the project. This will give me a sense of how long this chapter will be. I will also have to account for screen shots that will be taken later when I get the project working.

I feel bad that I am having trouble doing a remote project by myself. I worked alone out of my house for a year and half while learning programming and I could self motivate for that. To be fair, I never completed a project that was released to the world when working by myself. Also, working with another person on code they primarily wrote is an entirely different skill set than just doing your own thing.

I am an inherently social person. I like talking to people about their code. I am not one of those solitary programmers who lives in the basement staring at a screen. If I don’t have anyone to talk to about things that interest me, I kind of wilt and get depressed. I had hoped to work more directly with Chris on the book, but we both had a lot of curve balls thrown at us and it is understandable why it wasn’t really possible to spend an hour a day chatting on Skype about the book. I am hoping that working on the project together in person will accelerate the process of getting the book done.

Time: 8:15 am

Oh! Student Council elevator song from Utena is playing!

Touga: If it cannot break out of its shell, the chick will die without ever being born.
Miki: We are the chick-
Juri: The world is our egg.
Nanami: If we don’t crack the world’s shell, we will die without ever truly being born.
Saionji: Smash the world’s shell.
All: FOR THE REVOLUTION OF THE WORLD!

Sounds about right. Probably shouldn’t be listening to mind fuck anime soundtracks. What else do I have? Neon Genesis Evangelion, Puella Magi Madoka Magica, and Attack on Titan. This isn’t a promising development…

Time: 8:25 am
On second pot of tea. Already driving Chris insane with my pestering. Will leave the poor guy alone. It must be nice to be an introvert.

Time: 8:30 am

Holy crap! I actually started writing something for the chapter!

Time: 8:45 am

Went looking for sandals. Floor is gritty and covered with various pug debris. Resisting urge to procrastinate by trying to clean my office. I am looking forward to deep cleaning the living crap out of this room when I get done with this thing.

Time: 9:00 am
Current Music: Soundtrack to Puella Magi Madoka Magica

Succumbed to the temptation to clean when I went to refill my tea and saw lots of dirty dishes in the sink with a dishwasher full of clean dishes. Feel slightly better that the kitchen isn’t a complete mess. I should probably eat at some point in the future…

Time: 9:30 am
Current Music: Soundtrack to Attack on Titan

I figured out something I was confused about and didn’t understand about the framework, so I actually got some stuff written. Now I need to determine if this is something Chris explains earlier in the book.

Also ate the other half of my leftover crispy chicken sandwich and french fries from yesterday. I am sad that this is probably going to be the healthiest food I eat this weekend. I am keeping a food log of all the horrible things I am going to put in my body to punish myself for not getting this done sooner.

Time: 9:45 am

Got sidetracked by an argument with a friend of mine online about whether the TV show Scorpion is offensive and stereotypical to smart people. My friend is on the autism spectrum and is thrilled to see people like herself on TV. I am annoyed that it is assumed that if you are a smart person you must be completely socially inept. Wait, I am supposed to be writing now, aren’t I? *grumble*

(But seriously, if one piece of your dialog in the pilot is the main character telling the young white guy with glasses in the back of the room that he is a programmer and the guy asking, gee, how did you know, and the main guy saying lucky guess, guess what?? THAT IS A FUCKING OFFENSIVE STEREOTYPE!!!)

Time: 10:05 am

Having an existential thought about whether or not what I am writing is correct and if it isn’t, would anyone ever know? Wondering how many tech books I have read where the author was completely talking out of their ass and doesn’t know what they are doing only to figure out like years later that something they wrote was completely wrong. I guess it doesn’t matter because anything written about Apple tech is inherently ephemeral.

Time: 10:20 am

Got slightly derailed by a flare-up of my involuntary muscle twitching. Beginning to wonder if it might be an allergic reaction of some kind. This only happens when I am at home. When I travel to conferences or I am at work I rarely have any issues. I hope I am not allergic to my pugs. That would suck to the extreme.

Time: 10:45 am

The Husband returned from his outings. He brought me hacker food. He brought pizza, a case of Mountain Dew made with real sugar, and french silk pie. My digestive system is about ready to strike and walk off the job in protest. This will be fun.

Time: 11:45 am
Current Music: Soundtrack to The Rocky Horror Picture Show

Crap. I got pulled into conversations with people on Twitter. Chris seems to have gotten over my annoying him this morning and we are talking about Revolutionary Girl Utena. Also talking to people I need to connect with in Boston while I am there.

I am making progress on the book. I have written quite a lot so far. I have mentally broken thing up and I am putting the pieces together. I had to spend some time doing a little research, but I am able to find the answers I need fairly quickly and not falling down too many rabbit holes. Also not stressing myself out too badly or crawling the walls trying to escape. Plus, it’s almost noon and I haven’t thought about how long it is until I can open a bottle of wine, so yay to that.

Sadly, getting to the part of the book I am going to have to hack somewhat because it involves code I haven’t written yet. I want to write some of the glue code about the process even though I haven’t done it yet. Sigh.

Time: 12:00 pm
Tea: Adagio Raspberry Black Tea

On my third pot of caffeinated tea. I might want to consider switching to something herbal in a little while or else panic attacks will happen. I wonder if I switched to Mountain Dew if that would still result in panic attacks because caffeine is caffeine. Should run experiments on the pugs.

Time: 12:30 pm

As I am writing the chapter, I am realizing I might be approaching the project incorrectly by trying to describe doing it before creating it. I am taking a bunch of notes in the chapter to try to come up with a list of requirements for the project so I can start working on it when I am in town with Chris. Also need to look over the code better to figure out how to integrate this into what we have so far.

Also, figuring out that I am hungry. Grabbed a random pizza from the freezer and preheating the oven. Also took a can of Mountain Dew and threw it in the freezer to get it cold quickly. I am mentioning it so that when I inevitably forget to take it out of the freezer and it explodes there will be foreshadowing of that event.

Time: 1:30 pm

Managed to collaborate on a plan of action with Chris so we can make the most of our limited time in the same physical plane of existence.

I am creating a set of software requirements for my sample code. I am also looking over all of the code we have thus far to strategize about the best way to approach the code and the organization. I might just stub out some space in the book where I describe what is going to happen in each place.

Also made pizza and switched from tea to Mountain Dew (no, I didn’t forget the can in the freezer and we had no explosions.). Haven’t gotten super hyper yet. Give it some time.

Time: 2:15 pm

I am approaching the end of what I can do on this portion of things by myself. I am getting an idea about how I need to approach my project, which is what I will do for the remainder of my day. I am planning to tackle another part of the project tomorrow. Hopefully I will be able to put together a software requirements package that will allow me to just sit down and code my project when I can collaborate with Chris and we can get this stupid thing done and shipped.

Time: 2:30 pm

Bah. Tired. Time for first bath. Normally I would read tech books in the bathtub, but I am trying to avoid contaminating my focus with any of my other hobbies. Will probably just read historical fiction book about Henry II and Eleanor of Aquitaine. Pondering whether I want wine or not…

Time: 4:00 pm

Took my bath. Got really sleepy. Was really hoping that I could take a nap. No such luck. I really miss taking naps. I haven’t been able to have one in a while because when I go to lie down the involuntary twitching comes back and I can’t sleep.

Today has been a fairly productive day. I am trying to spend what energy I have left outlining the things I need to figure out to implement the first part of this project.

Going to navigate away from my desk. My arm and leg are jerking so much that I am afraid of falling off of my ball. I need to go to bed or somewhere that I am not going to fall over and hurt myself.

Tentatively going to call it a day unofficially. Going to get up tomorrow and continue on my odyssey of writing. See you then!

You Kids, Get off my Virtual Realty!!

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Over the weekend I was surprised with a gift I didn’t think I would ever get: New ports of a bunch of my favorite games from when I was in my impressionable tweenaged years. First among these games was “Sam and Max Hit the Road.” Closely following this cultural touchstone were “Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis” and the “Legend of Kyrandia” trilogy.

I became acquainted with the point and click adventure game genre through my brother. When I was in junior high my dad bought my brother a computer for Christmas and bought me a wooden chess set. I am not bitter about this. Much…

Anyway, he was working through Day of the Tentacle. I would walk by and wonder what the hell it was he was playing. It looked weird and creepy. It is weird and creepy, but at the time it didn’t look weird and creepy in an endearing way.
Day_of_the_Tentacle_Founding_Fathers
One day I got curious and started asking him about what was going on. He was stuck on a puzzle in the game but he couldn’t explain to me what had happened up until then, so I went on the computer and started my own game.

Holy crap, this game was amazing! There are so many weird and surreal things going on this game that it may have irreparably warped my sense of humor. Possibly more so than it was warped before. A game with time traveling port-o-potties, a valley dude hanging out with George Washington, and a plot point that requires you to freeze and microwave a hamster is more than a little sick and twisted.

We worked in parallel on our game. One of us would make progress and we would share it with the other person. It took us a really long time to get through that game. It feels like it took months. It might have, I really don’t remember.

When an artifact comes along, you must whip it!

When an artifact comes along, you must whip it!

After polishing off Day of the Tentacle, we worked through Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis. We thought there was only one path through the game and we had screwed it up by ditching Sofia halfway through the game. After working through the game a few times we realized that there were actually three successful paths through the game. That got us really excited to go through the game and replay it a few times to figure out how many different ways the game could be won.

I did want to make a brief mention of my bewilderment about the death of the Indiana Jones franchise. Fate of Atlantis proved that Indiana Jones could be a great franchise where you have a nice formula that is infinitely customizable without getting overly stale. I am saddened that the last few films felt like they had to do like character development or something. Indiana Jones totally could have been James Bond with archaeology. Such a missed opportunity.

The Tunnel of Love from Hell!

The Tunnel of Love from Hell!

It took us a lot longer to get through Sam and Max. There was a point in the game where you had to go into the Tunnel of Love and hit a specific place on the wall at exactly the right moment in order to find the Mole Boy who wanted pecan flavored candies. We went crazy trying to get past this point in the game. We knew something was there, but we never hit the wall at the right moment. I think we worked on this game on and off for months. I think we restarted the game just to be able to play the game up until that point because we enjoyed the twisted sense of humor so much. In fact, we replayed up until that point so many times that there is a full two thirds of the game I barely remember because I played it all the way through just once or twice.

I don’t remember which one of us got past that point or if we did it together. I do remember we were both elated that we could finally continue on with the game and we celebrated that moment together.

The summer between seventh and eighth grade I encountered two games: Myst and Legend of Kyrandia. Legend of Kyrandia was another SCUMM-based adventure game created by a company other than LucasArts. Our school had a summer enrichment program that many of us quickly realized meant that we could hang out at school and play computer games all day.
the-legend-of-kyrandia-screen-4
I don’t remember who found Legend of Kyrandia, but it very quickly became a favorite of everyone in the group of about ten of us. We were obsessed with this game. There is a point in the game where you get lost in these caves and if you don’t light them properly you get eaten by animals. We all worked together to piece together a map of the entire cave, along with all the objects that are hidden that you needed. When someone would make progress in the game we would quickly spread that new information to everyone else in the group. It took us a few weeks to work through the game and it worked as something of a bonding experience for all of us that immediately was forgotten when school started up again.

My experience with Legend of Kyrandia was vastly different than my experience with Myst. I had to work through that game alone. I played it a lot because I thought the graphics were pretty. Myst is in fact one of the things that got me interested in 3D graphics and texture mapping. I really wanted to know how the worlds were made. Unfortunately, I didn’t get as far into the game as I would have liked. I didn’t realize you could leave the island until I bought a strategy guide. I thought you were just supposed to wander around and look at all the pretty scenery. I couldn’t understand why everyone thought the game was so amazing. After figuring out you could leave, I was far more excited about the game.

At this point, you may be wondering why I am rambling on about my lost childhood gaming experiences. I have a point. If you read through this spiel, you will notice that not once did anyone ever check the Internet to see what to do when we got stuck. If we got stuck, we just didn’t progress in the game.

Pro tip: Don't stick your hand in a crack in the wall on an alien planet. Just don't.

Pro tip: Don’t stick your hand in a crack in the wall on an alien planet. Just don’t.

The only games I was able to get all the way through were ones that I worked on with at least one other person. I found a simulated version of Legend of Kyrandia and I tried working through it on my own, but I quickly got stuck in the caves, got bored, and just downloaded a map off the internet.

I find it mind boggling that my brother and I literally spent YEARS when I was a teenager working through these games. We would be stuck on puzzles for months. Yet we would sit there and just keep trying anything we could think of to get through the game.

When was the last time anyone ever spent a month working through a game? The last game my husband bought was Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword. He spent about a week playing through the game, beat it, then threw it in a box and forgot about it.

Back when I used to work at Target I would bring my Nintendo DS to work. I had Lego Harry Potter to play on my breaks to blow off steam. I would only play that game when I was at work as something to help me get through my day without going insane. After I had been working on it for a month one of the back room guys came over and said, “Wait, you’re still working on playing that same game?!” It’s inconceivable that anyone would spend a month playing a game without either giving up or beating it.

I don’t pretend to be any kind of gamer, but are games easier than they used to be? It seems to me like people used to spend weeks or months working through games. I read a blog post by a guy talking about working through one of the first Zelda games by coming home from school and being glued to the TV for weeks.

Waiting for the smoke monster to show up with the polar bear.

Waiting for the smoke monster to show up with the polar bear.

I am kind of sad that I don’t really see games out anymore that take months to get through. I am also really sad that I don’t get to work through a game with other people anymore. That summer working through that game was a really awesome experience. I have felt rather isolated from my classmates in school. I always did group projects on my own. Having an experience where we all worked together on something that we were excited about was a gift.

I don’t have this experience of working through games anymore, but I have found that I can get something like it when I talk to people about code. Right now my boss is working through functional Swift programming using Haskell design patterns and syntax. Sitting with him looking at the stuff he is doing and trying to catch up so that I can help out is surprisingly emotionally fulfilling.

I wonder if people who grew up with the internet will ever get a chance to work through a problem with someone where the answer isn’t instantly available online. One reason I am finding working on the Swift problem so exhilarating is that there isn’t a “right” or “wrong” way to do things yet. Coming from a school background, I’m used to the idea that the person who knows more than I do has a right answer to the problem we are supposed to solve for class. Being in a situation where that answer isn’t known yet is somewhat freeing. It gives these things we are doing meaning. We aren’t just doing mind games or mental exercises. This is it. This is why I learned to code, to solve a problem.

Working through those silly adventure games really gave me tenacity to keep working at something that I knew there had to be an answer to, even if it wasn’t immediately available. It also taught me how important sharing knowledge and collaborating is. None of us would have gotten through the game in the time we did if we hadn’t worked together and pooled our knowledge.

Giving information to someone who doesn’t have it costs us nothing. Working together we can do things we couldn’t do separately.

I haven’t opened any of my games yet. I am afraid I won’t remember how to do anything and I won’t have anyone to play them with. Maybe I’ll find someone to play with. Maybe not. Either way, I’m sure they will be harder than I remember them being.

So are we, Bernard. So are we.

So are we, Bernard. So are we.