Summer Vacation, You Thought
Day 23. Week five in the books. We roll into the 4th of July break now — a nice, comfy four-day weekend, or so we thought.
The Honors English Teacher Move
They loaded us down with work right before the break. It's exactly the feeling I used to get in high school — yay, summer vacation — and then my honors English teacher goes, yeah, you thought you were getting a vacation? Here's three books, read them by the beginning of next year, come ready to discuss on week one.
That's pretty much what happened today. Practice assessment, tons of exercises, and a wrinkle on top of it: I'd been ahead all week, but it turned out some of what I was grinding through was actually optional and just wasn't being tracked. That kind of screwed with my sense of where I stood. Not that it mattered much in the end — extra practice is extra practice — but it was a reminder to actually read the calendar instead of assuming.
This Is the Acceleration
Last week was the end of the AI block. This week is the acceleration they warned us about. It really does feel like there's more material than there is class time to absorb it in, and I don't think that's an accident. The first month, especially with the AI-assisted stretch, they could afford to give us open afternoons. That was probably by design. Now we're expected to hand-code everything, and there's just more volume on top of that. Today it was GitHub Actions and a bit of binary search.
I was honest about this in retro today: lectures don't really do it for me. No shade on the instructors — it's just that I need to be typing or copying code to learn something new. That's the fastest path in for me, especially with a concept I haven't touched before, like GitHub Actions. Once I saw it, the parallel clicked fast — it's basically a Dockerfile, except for GitHub. The actual YAML was the easy part. The real learning was navigating the GitHub UI itself — what happens when a test fails, where you go to see why, how you read the output.
Rewriting Someone Else's Code, On Purpose
Since the lecture wasn't landing for me, I did something I've been meaning to try for a while. I spent the afternoon coding a game instead — a Space Invaders clone, based on a freeCodeCamp exercise, first built with help from Claude Fable 5. But then, for the first time, I went back and started rewriting the entire codebase by hand. Not just copying it either — stopping on every piece I didn't fully understand and working through it.
This felt very familiar. It's the same thing I've been doing with Chinese for the past year, reading Three-Body Problem one sentence at a time — translate, learn the new word, learn the new structure, move on. Slow as hell at the start because there's so much you don't know yet. But it works. I read half of the first Harry Potter book in Japanese the same way. It's just slow. That's what today's afternoon was — the coding equivalent of that sentence-by-sentence method.
And because I was actually building something real, I got to use GitHub Actions on my own project for the first time, which is where the real friction showed up — a test failing in the pipeline that wasn't failing locally, and having to actually dig in and figure out why. That's the kind of thing a lecture can gesture at but can't really teach you. You have to hit the wall yourself.
What This Weekend Actually Is
So, four-day weekend, technically. But there's a real pile of Code Platoon work sitting in it. I'd have been coding anyway — I keep wanting to pull back toward LeetCode and freeCodeCamp, and toward my own games — but the priority has to be the coursework. That's the focus for the weekend.
That's the recap for week five.