What it Feels Like to Code Under Time Pressure... Most Stressful Experience of my LIFE!

in #programming6 years ago


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Hey guys! Today I had the fun of coding under some extreme time pressure. Basically, I had left my programming assignment wayyyy too late which is why I had to rush it so much.

A bit of background

So, I am currently in first year university studying a double degree of computer science and commerce! For my computer science degree, I am required to learn Python 3 which is simultaneously challenging AND enjoyable! Hopefully in the future, I can use my degree to either get into blockchain, fintech, or professional Steemit blogger ;)

Leading up to today

I've had a few assignments due in this week, this one being my last. The other assignments had been quite close together (3 in 2 days) so I had to get those done first as my Python project was due in 3 days after those. I had all of Friday, Saturday and today (Sunday) to do it but Friday was reserved for the boys, Saturday I finished about 50% of it in 5 hours so I started to chill a bit which meant no work done.

Today...

I started the assignment at around 3PM, starting a coding project from the middle is always hard for me as I'm just beginning and have very bad structure and notes. It took me a while to remember exactly what I was doing and after running a few tests and debugging a bit, it was 6PM... This was mainly due to being stuck for 2 hours because I had missed used == instead of = and Pycharm didn't pick it up as an error... looking through 400 lines of code (at that point) for a single mistake isn't easy especially when you expect everything to work perfectly as the logic was sound. After putting random in random commands like print("hi") at random places to see if it actually gets there, I finally narrowed it down to line 318...

At this point I was a little nervous as I had essentially spent 3 hours doing NOTHING, still at around the 50% mark. I told myself that it's alright, just gotta keep going.

You see, my project was split into two parts, I was just debugging the first part and starting the 2nd part at this point when I realised that the 2nd part was a LOT harder than I thought. By finishing just the first part, that was probably only around 30% done.

A few hours pass and progress is coming along smoothly. I write the final lines of my code for the first part of the second part (yup, the second part has two parts) and run it. As expected, bugs galore! I found and mixed so many bugs I had even found a bug that was translated over from part 1 as the whole project was one program. After spending some time fixing part 1, I had destroyed the whole thing. I hadn't even saved a back up before I started fucking around with the part 1 again. By this stage, pretty much nothing was working in my part 1 and my part 2 was still half way done and not technically working due to bugs from part 1. After kinda cheating a little (my program doesn't work 100% of the time, but hopefully it doesn't get tested on the stuff that doesn't work!), the bugs from part 1 were finally fixed. This let me fix stuff on part 2. By this stage, it was already around 9:30PM which meant only 2 and a half hours before it was due. This is when I started to panic

My part 2 still wasn't working properly. I had around 2 hours left and I had to finish my program and write a few hundred words about how it works and ways to improve it. So, knowing that there was about 20% in the documents, I chose to do those first just in case I didn't finish. Those took about 30 minutes and back to coding I went.

Just 90 minutes left until the deadline. Code still buggy... at this point seriously contemplating just handing it in late and copping a -10%... but I have tomorrow's work to do tomorrow!!

I check the time... 75 minutes left. My fingers are trying as fast as they could to work shit out but my brain is just dead after almost 9 hours of continuous coding.

Finally... just under an hour left I had a BREAKTHROUGH! One of my if statements (with like 5 other elif statements) was missing an elif statement AND one of my "or"s was meant to be an "and", literally never made this mistake before!! Even when I was doing logic in maths this never happened so I didn't even check there at all! In fact, I had discovered this mistake probably like half an hour ago but my mind didn't even think to check my "or"s and "and"s, I just assumed it was something else wrong.

So, under an hour left I can finally start on part 2 part 2, which is basically just the reverse of part 2 part 1.This is when I realised that I still had to write comments on my code (we get marks for "insightful comments), so I started to panic again. I literally copied my code for part 2 part 1 into a word doc, used the find and replace tool and just replaced some variables and BAM, part 2 part 2 is done. To my surprise, it actually worked... kinda. Honestly I'm not sure if it worked. For part 2, they were both brute force algorithms with randomly generated stuff, so I can't really verify if it worked. Well, if I had time I could've but I only had about 35 minutes to re-read and write insightful comments on 600 lines of code, plus debug it just a little to make sure that part 2 part 2 wasn't a complete failure.

After writing about 50 "insightful comments", I had finally had enough. It's finally done. I had about 10 minutes to submit online and after hitting that submit button, I finally feel free!

I have exams coming up in about 3 weeks, but fuck I'm gonna give myself at least one day to just chill and enjoy!!!

Thanks for reading!

Have you had a similar experience? Feel free to share and discuss in the comments!

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I once submitted a cs assignment with under a minute left to the deadline

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That's pretty much how I accomplished every project for all classes was when I was in school lol. (I'm an expert procrastinator!) I always said I worked best under pressure (except when I didn't haha). Glad you were able to get it all finished, hope you get the grade you are looking for! :)

The beginning is always difficult but in the end you will see the fruits of your great work

Programming in python takes work but it's fun, I just do a little bit, like a month ago I tried a script from a bot that answers comments, but I can not use it because I can not leave my pc on for a long time. I hope that soon you make a bot to use it, even if it's fun friend :)

I wish you a happy day and a better life

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