Day 10

Part of the problem with this entire endeavor is that I’m trying to learn so many new things at one time, every thing I do becomes frustrating in its slowness. I really was looking forward to getting into a groove and coding on something for hours at a time but what I’ve discovered instead is that I code for 15 minutes and then run into something else I don’t know. It’s a tiring process. I finally started to make some decent progress on the NBA project tonight at 7:30 but by then, my brain was mostly mush.

I have to say that I’ve learned more in 10 days than I ever thought possible. Even though I’ve written about 200 lines of code, it’s all been related to new stuff that is applicable as I write more complicated applications in Python.

Of course, in tackling the NBA project, I took on an extremely complex project in and of itself. NBA statistics are rather poor and I’m trying to improve those. To do that, I have to basically parse the play-by-play charts and add meaning to them based on knowledge of the game. This is not something that’s exactly trivial to do in code. If I ever make the breakthrough technologically wise, there’s no guarantee that it will actually get easier since the domain is so difficult. However, it’s nice to actually work on something that causes me to look up 60 minutes later and wonder where the hour went, not to mention something that actually causes me to feel neurons in my head firing. It’s a fun change after 4 years of almost 95% brain dead time.

Overall, I’m pleased with the first week of no paychecks though it’s caused some internal anxiety for sure. Money is very important to me, probably too much so, and to watch it go out the door just because my last job was crap is still difficult to swallow. I think that if I work on this project some more on Sunday and Monday, that feeling will start to subside as I gain traction both on the domain space and the technology I have chosen to tackle it in.

Being at the computer 12 hours a day will never get easy, especially on my wrists, though.