Highs and Lows

Code Platoon, week 15. Third to last day. Yesterday I said it was fucking done. Today I spent another two hours redoing part of the presentation, felt too sick to sit at my screen, and found out I was the honor grad for the class.

Highs and lows. Oh, highs and lows.

I woke up more or less fine. I'd felt a tickle in my throat last night, but this morning it didn't seem like it was going to be a whole thing. Then came the headache, dizziness, chills, body aches, and this awful lower back pain. I don't know if I had a fever. I just felt terrible.

By the afternoon, after we were done with everything we needed to do, I laid down on the floor for about 30 minutes. I could barely sit up at my screen. I just had to crash.

That was the physical backdrop for the rest of the day.

The morning also included somewhere between an hour and a half and two hours collectively on the phone with the VA. I still haven't been paid. Code Platoon hasn't been paid either. I kept getting told they needed more paperwork or couldn't see something on their end.

I gave you everything I had. I don't understand what's happening.

Apparently I'm not the only one dealing with this, which helps a little, but it doesn't get the payment here. Mostly it was more time on the phone with nothing resolved.

Then there was the presentation feedback.

I spent hours yesterday making the YoungMoney video, and I was thrilled with how it came out. The casino footage, the music, the app walkthrough, the technical explanation. I'd made something with some personality. A little commercial for what we'd built.

My read of the feedback was that the bombastic approach wasn't really the preferred style. A more traditional presentation probably would have gone over better. Fine. Everybody doesn't have to like the same thing.

The part that frustrated me was having to redo work because the rest of the team wasn't visibly included. Two of us had presented. I'd talked about the other teammates, but they didn't have speaking parts or pictures in the video.

I can understand wanting to see the whole team in a group presentation. What bothered me was that I hadn't understood that to be a requirement. The requirements were explicit about the technologies, the architecture, and deployment. I'd built the presentation around those, much like the personal project.

Now the project had been graded, and I was spending another two hours putting the team into a video I thought was finished.

There were some bugs and questions about the app, but the app was mostly fine. The biggest hang-up was the presentation. I got the impression that its role as a Code Platoon marketing piece mattered here: something that showed the people as well as the software. That was my interpretation, but if that's part of the intended use, I want to know it before I spend hours making the thing.

That's useful information at the beginning.

The other team's presentation got plenty of criticism too. They ended up needing to redo theirs over audio, video quality, and the flow. So the feedback was being applied across the board. Still, it reinforced my frustration with expectations that hadn't been clear to me up front. Presentation quality takes time, and knowing what someone expects changes how you spend that time.

Being sick did not improve my patience with any of this.

I mostly survived the afternoon. I wanted to say, look, I'm here all the time, but today I'm dead. I can barely do this. I held on, and we ended up playing Jeopardy. With two days until graduation, it finally feels like things are letting up a little.

Then, at the very end of the day, they announced I was the honor grad.

That was cool.

I showed up all the time except for excused absences. I got 100 on all the assessments, which I guess means the group assessment too, even if today's feedback didn't make it feel that way.

I've been in enough programs with an honor grad or some version of it that I don't quite know how much weight to put on the title. But I can still appreciate it. I put a lot into this summer, and getting recognized for that felt good.

I met the requirements. I exceeded the expectations. There you go.

Two days left. Right now, I need to lie down.