Yesterday marked the end of my first sprint at Hack Reactor. Looking back at my unfinished work, it’s hard to put that behind me and move on to the next sprint.

HR has a nice methodology when it comes to moving on the loop of learning; in a paraphrased form, there is an idea that new information should become familiar but not mastered. The reason behind not fully mastering a certain subject is that by the time you master something, another individual who instead developed just a working knowledge is done with the task you just had at hand as well as many other ones. Between the two styles of mastery vs. familiarity, one who takes the familiar route succeeds at HR, especially because the learning is so accelerated and there is a limit of time involved.

Today’s sprint is part of a 4 day module of learning about various data structures. The 4 days are actually split up into 2 sprints that are related in topic. For the first 2 days, my new partner and I are following the sprint directions implementing simple (simpler?) data structures. In addition to solely implement the data structures, this part of the 4 days includes learning about JavaScript instantiation patterns.

One thing that stuck out to me while implementing 2 data structures in various patterns is that it’s hard to think of a way of coding a data structure without using something you already know. For example, when implementing a stack, it’s an easy ordeal to associate the stack with an array. The array in JavaScript list-like object which has many predefined methods that lend themselves to the same methods that a stack should have such as ‘push’ and ‘pop’. Coming up with an algorithm with my partner requires implementing methods and storage facilities that we take for granted in an array. Thankfully, we’re up for the challenge.