I'm sitting here in my hardware class learning about a 4-1 MUX. I'm not paying attention. Instead, I'd like to talk about things I'm truly interested in, things I'm worried about, and things I'd like to do.
Last night, I found a video from Carter Semrad where he went over all the projects he made in a year. He kept up with the schedule of one project per week and produced some amazing results.
This video inspired me to really try and make my own projects. I'm very tired of attempting something and getting stuck on something too technical for me. I'm also very tired of starting things and stopping them a week or two later. I think I'd like to try at least one project per month. I'm starting this Hashnode blog mostly for the purpose of keeping track of my journey.
Nagging Insecurities
I often hear people online--mostly developers--talk about how they know absolutely nothing about a subject, or they're completely terrible. Then they turn around and create a masterfully constructed and thought-out project that causes me to feel great despair. If they know nothing, do I have negative knowledge? Another prickly feeling: I feel that being a woman prevents me from being as intelligent and knowledgeable as my male peers. That insecurity is entirely irrational and based on folly. It is my own meekness that holds me back. I must stop viewing self-esteem as a binary system, where insecurity and arrogance are the only two emotions. As ridiculous and simple as it sounds, I really just need to relax. Stop thinking about how you appear to others. Work on your lack of knowledge which is pretty much on par with your age and skill level.
Thinking through the Maze Problem
Imposter syndrome is hard to get past when the anxiety is truly justified. In terms of homework, I'm a good student. In terms of tests, I fail dramatically. I often lack the specific thought process to work through coding assignments, and I quickly fall back on lazy techniques. Most problems require this style of thinking that I can only describe as very deep thought. For example, the maze problem. Create a program that designs a maze. How can we even begin to do this? Let's give it a shot. We'll use C++ and the console as the "GUI". Walls will be created with Xs and walkable spaces are blank. The maze will be a square shape with so many rows across and so many rows down. For this, we can use a 2D array. Perfect. Now how do we populate this array? We can't just have clumps of Xs thrown randomly in the grid. We also need an exit and entry point as well as a constant outline of Xs around the whole thing. Let's think of the array as a printer. The first dimension should print out a row of Xs. I'm not sure where we should place the entry gate. The maze would have to be solvable based on the exit and entry points. I've reached a roadblock.
SR Latch Flip flop is 1 bit memory. Learn this!!