I am basically at the half way point right now. We have completed 5 weeks, and have 5 weeks until it is time to start preparing for demo day. I still feel confident that I am keeping pace with what we are learning in class. Nothing has totally tripped me up where I feel lost or that I might be falling behind. I do however wish I had more time to put into coding outside of class. I am at that point where I want to advance myself much further than what we are covering in class. I just don't have the time as I try to keep up with 2 full time jobs (being a father / husband and also Chi Cheng).
This weekend Code Academy had their first of 2 hackathons. Students met up on Friday and pitched ideas. Teams then formed and they worked on executing those ideas until it was time to present them on Sunday afternoon. I did not participate. I have thrown a lot of responsibility on Julie's shoulders these past 5 weeks. She has basically been a single Mom during the week, and hasn't seen much of me on the weekends either. This was her weekend, and i did not want to short change her once again.
Even though I did not participate in the hackathon, it was not a totally lost weekend when it came to programming. I put in about 6 hours of time on Friday night and Saturday building a new app idea. As I was working on my weekly project updates for Chi Cheng, I realized that making a web app version of the report would make my life a lot easier. My boss could have instant access to my report at all times. No more emailing the report (and we all know how much I love sending emails...)! I was able to get it about 50% completed. I have some complicated model associations that I need to figure out and also setting up user accounts.
While I am on the subject of work, I have to say that I am getting pretty burnt out. I do what I can to try and stay caught up on Monday, Wednesday, and Fridays. The emails seem never ending. Just between Friday at 10PM and this morning at 8AM I had over 125 emails. It was a weekend, and there were 125 emails sent about the projects I am working on. Things have not slowed up. I feel like all I am doing is following up with people and shaking them down for info that they owe me. The work is endless and I have really lost all the passion I once had for launching the next great electronic product. I felt like I needed a break from my job when starting Code Academy. Now that I have fallen in love with coding, the job sucks that much more....
