Okay, so I have a few days without school to work on my code sample. I know I talk every day about doing my code sample and this probably looks like I don’t know what I am doing, so not sure if I should document my meanderings!

I read a book recently by a gymnast who, at the peak of her career, won the US National Championship. She talked about how when she would get the gym in the morning and hop on the balance beam she would immediately know if it was going to be an “On” day or an “Off” day. She would not feel comfortable doing anything dangerous on the off days because she would not be in her flow.

I feel that way with learning programming. Some days I can focus and I know what I want to accomplish and how to make it happen. Other days I can’t get into my flow. I sit here and fuck around on the internet thinking I will look at just one more site, then I hear the door open and I realize my husband is home and I have been screwing around for eight hours. D’oh!

I know that if I were being asked to do something I was familiar with I could bang it out with no issues. It is when I am trying to do something for the first or second time that have trouble focusing. I have processes that are percolating through my brain and I am waiting for it to click.

I know that I won’t ever be at a point where I am just doing stuff I already know how to do. Things change so much and so fast that you have to be constantly on top of things or else you will fall behind.

I just hope that at some point I know enough of what I am doing down cold that I can get more done.

So the big things I need to do in order to get past this current hump are that I need to set up a dictionary to receive JSON data regarding exchange rates. I have done this once before, but it was with a text document on my desktop. I need to defamiliarize myself with how to parse the data and find out if I need to do something different if I am sending a query to a website rather than reading a text document.

I also need to create the UIPickerView objects. I need to populate them with the countries whose currency I am planning to convert and I need to set them up to send their data to the object that will be calculating the conversion rate.

So I have an object that is receiving the conversion rates and the data from the two Picker Views that determine which rate is being converted and to which rate.

The Flag views also need to receive data from the Picker Views in order to know which flags get displayed.

I really should set up a UML document so that I can visually create a view control document. Crap, now I see why we took that class!

Hopefully this isn’t boring to the five or so people who are reading my musings. Also hopefully this isn’t off-putting to anyone thinking about hiring me.