Week 10: A2's Wrath

A loving father would let his child take a glimpse of true hardship, not to let the child fear for eternity, but to arm him with tools to fight for himself.

Most UofT courses tend to serve us a tremendous amounts of deadlines near the end of the course. In these torturing weeks, I had to face assignment 2 with fatigue. Had I known how hellish this week would be, I would've certainly pushed myself to start the assignment on day 1. The logic involved in this assignment is quite difficult to grasp. Once you understand the general idea of regex, as I did after reading the handout plenty of times, your goal becomes clear. Problem is, understanding your task is only step one of the whole assignment. Anyhow, once I understood what I'm asked to do, and happily coding away, the brackets of regex dot and regex bar starts haunting me. As normal, I try to look for hints on the discussion board and from Google search. This time, Google had nothing for me because python has its own regular expressions and methods tailored to it. So my only guide was myself and the discussion board. I wished I never knew people used helper functions for is_regex. 

I had been thinking on the right track the entire time even if my solution was nowhere close to the model answer. But, I was too hung up on the idea that my idea would take forever and an easier way out is mostly likely a helper function. Countless hours had been wasted with me staring at the code and desperately finding an answer to why would I want a helper function for. Eventually, after 12 hours, I finally decided to work on my idea and got it finished half-decently. My only regret is I never went back to it and add one line of code that would address all cases, which is a simple

else:

    return False

line inside my brackets-addressing case.

I really wish to know how outstanding minds work. Recursion now strikes me as intricate ideas presented in a minimalist manner. Just like how the most amazing performers work for years for one performance, and the outcome is just a few hours of performance that some may overlook and never understand its value. But I digress... I want to know how brilliant minds filter ideas after sufficient brainstorming. Because when I got stuck, I had no will to carry on, not even for some simple trial and error. Also, there were barely any ideas in my head except one. I simply didn't understand how else I could've approached the problem. This is the first time I felt so powerless for this course, but I least I learnt to start early for all assignments. At least by starting early, my mind can process the problem subconsciously and automatically come up with ideas over time.

This assignment was another wake-up call to my habits. And hopefully I can make up my incapability to rely on my immediate wits with patience and determination... I mean... Not procrastinating and strictly enforcing it from now on.