Tomorrow is my Intro to iOS Development midterm. Huzzah.

I have been laid up with a cold/migraine/sinus infection for a week or so. I have a brand new box of Kleenex that I used half of already.

I did not complete my code sample. What I wanted to do was a few steps beyond what I am capable of doing. I am going back and forth on how to do outside work such as this. Should I try to stretch and do something I don’t know how to do yet or is it a waste of time because it is usually harder than I think it will be.

I wasted a bunch of time trying to figure out the UIPickerView without really understanding the mechanics behind how they work. I didn’t think it would be that hard. In PHP you can do the drop-down method in a few minutes. I did not realize that there were going to delegates and data sources and a bunch of other things that need to play nicely together.

I don’t know if trying to figure that out on my own before learning it was a waste of time. I don’t think I really understood anything out of it, but I learned how to look stuff up?

There seems to be two schools of thought on programming: You sit down and puzzle it out on your own or you ask someone for help because you can get something accomplished in five minutes that you might take days to figure out on your own.

I tend to generally cling to the second school of thought. I think that it is similar to the quote by Thomas Jefferson about the patent system: “He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me.”

I think as long as you are able to process the help you are given by someone who knows more than you do, you are not being a user. Everyone started somewhere. If you get help from someone when you are a beginner, then you have a responsibility to pass that information down to new beginners.

But occasionally I get stubborn and think that I can learn it on my own with no help from anyone. Sometimes, if it’s something that isn’t too far away from what I know how to do, I can figure it out. If it is something I have never seen before, it is usually way harder than I think it will be and I get nowhere.

Also have similar thoughts about tutorials. One could argue that tutorials don’t really teach you stuff because you are typing out what another person figured out and wrote. I find them to be useful, especially if I do them multiple times. The first time you do it, it just kind of works like magic. The second time you kind of start to piece together how everything works. If you wind up doing it a half-dozen times or more you really understand what is going on and you can apply it to other things.

So I agree if you do a tutorial once, it really doesn’t do much more than introduce you to a concept, but if you have the patience to do them multiple times they can really aid understanding.

Alright, I should be studying and not procrastinating on my blog :p

Hadn’t posted in a little while and I did not want anyone to think I had abandoned my posts!