Tic-tac-toe: I thought this post would never come...

(This should have been posted on 03/11/24)

Things I've worked on/completed since my last post…

This has been a long time coming as I really went off track with this project and too much longer than I should have, but…

I completed Tic-tac-toe(!!!!!) Believe me, the five (brackeed) exclamation marks are necessary here.

Things that went well...

Finishing the project. Accepting the imperfections in my code, especially when comparing other people’s solutions to my own.

Things that didn't go quite so well...

This week was mostly a positive week, so not much to report here.

Things I've learnt/need to improve on...

Here, I mainly want to talk about where i went seriously wrong with this project, which I will summarise in the following points:

I had no problem writing the procedural code for the logic of this game, however, this was not the aim of the project.

The whole concept of objects and how they interact with each other just completely threw me off and I felt completly lost as to how to put things together.

The module pattern was not clear in my head, in spite of trying to read around the subject (albeit it’s clearer now)

I felt like I was guessing a lot of the time.

I ended up getting a working version in the console, but in order to work, it required inputted information in the form of prompts, which of course meant I had to rejig a lot of things to tie this into the UI working version. I did not know that I could play the game in the console by simply calling functions in the console (this just never occurred to me, although it seems a lot more obvious now). Had I done this, I could have left my ‘console code’ untouched when it came to working on the interaction with the DOM (the displayController)

I eventually got something working, but my displayController had a lot going on it it. Somebody pointed this out to me trying to help, which made me think I had gone seriously wrong again and I started looking (very briefly!) at other’s people solutions - not to copy, but to have some idea of how they approached this.

In all honestly, their solutions seemed beyond my capabilites and included getters and setters and other things I did not yet understand. I then looked at the Connect Four code example in the ‘Building a House from the Inside Out’ article and some of this also confused me (in that, I struggled to understand some parts of the code).

In the end, I just took out the prompts in my console game version and then tried to build the displayController and made any further adjustments as required as frankly, I felt like I was not going to finish this project (which I thought I would finish in a week).

I think I was a little overwhelmed by just not knowing how to put things together and looking at other people’s code which was more advanced and a lot cleaner than mine. I had never done this before (looked at other people’s solutions), but I thought it would give me an idea what to do. It didn’t help in the end and don’t plan to do that again until I have finished my own project - I would almost go so far as to say that it made things worse for me, as I felt like I was on the completely wrong track.

As a few Odinites pointed out to me, some of these solutions have been modified by students as they progressed throughout the course, but at that time, I just thought I had fundamentally misunderstood the course theory and required approach. I can see now that some of the concepts included are not covered until later in the course and so looking at other’s solutions was a hindrance to me. Lesson learnt - I hope.

Am I now an expert on this project? No. Do I understand certain aspects of it better? Yes. I even find myself re-reading some help that other Odintes gave me and find myself thinking, why didn’t I understand it at the time?

In any case, it’s time to move on…onwards and upwards, hopefully…

Plan for the forthcoming week...

I hope to at least get through the theory on:

- Classes

- ES6 Modules

- NPM