Posted by Elizabeth Parisi on May 28, 2021

I’ve finally made it up to my first project, and let me just say that the labs leading up to the project are not easy! I’m looking at you Music Library CLI and Tic Tac Toe with AI. These took me longer than I care to admit. And now that I’m finally staring down the project tunnel and can just about see the light on the other side, I’m trying to review all of the Ruby concepts I’m supposed to have absorbed so far.

Needless to say, I feel like I’m going a bit crazy while gearing up to build something with no real instructions. I’ve been reading and coding and working on the labs and somehow I still feel like my grasp of all these concepts I need to implement in the project is a little tenuous. I know what I want to do, I know it can be done but the feeling that I’m not entirely sure I know how to get my ideas from my brain into code is very present. Plus, really the ultimate goal is not just to get from idea to code but concise, working code. It almost feels like it’s similar to pulling at a chainsaw to get it to start up, you know it’s going to work, you just have to get it started and from there it’ll be a breeze. I hope I’m not alone in this feeling.

This post is obvioulsy less about actual concepts than the fact that sometimes even when you think you understand something, when you’re out there in the deep end, on your own and staring at a blank screen it can feel like you know nothing. I’m hoping, now that I’ve created the skeleton app and repository on Github, it will start to flow. I’ve pulled the chainsaw, let’s see if it starts up on the first shot. Good luck to all my fellow students working on their CLI projects!