I never really liked tennis all that much. Except, of course, when I was at-net for doubles drills and continuously put the ball away with a well-angled punch towards the alley. It wasn’t a superfluous skill for me — it was survival. The faster I finished the drill, the faster I got off the court, and the less likely I would get hit in the face. My coach, though, loved to praise me for my “aggressiveness” at the net, yet loved to ignore me for everything else — of course, everything else included my penchant to lose games at luv-forty. I didn’t quite enjoy winning for a coach that ignored half the players yet spent an exorbitant amount of collectively-fundraised money on silver charm necklaces for the other half. I think I may have actually liked tennis, though, I just didn’t like my coach.

I never really liked coding all that much either. There is no except-statement for this. 

Fundamentals of Computer Science summer intensive? Cried for 3 weeks straight. AP Computer Science? Should not have passed the class (as evidenced by its accompanying score). The one time I forced myself to start Codeacademy? Lasted less than an hour before forfeiting.

I enjoyed “coding” exactly one time in my life — freshman year of high school, editing the HTML of my tumblr blog to change the background image and add a music playlist. Yes, I was a tumblr teen™.

When my ENGI 120 project this past fall instantly changed from a majority-mechanical problem to majority-electronic, I was exceptionally frustrated, but I grit my teeth and sorta-kinda started learning Arduino and Raspberry Pi. Then, for funsies (don’t ask), I took ELEC 220 Fundamentals of Computer Engineering and started learning how to use a TI Launchpad. I don’t think I’ve ever left a course that confused.

However, I like making cool things and some of the cool things I want to make require a microcontroller. I think that’s why I’m actually excited for this project — it’s functionally similar to a project I’ve been researching this whole summer. Learning Arduino for Ring the Decibels incidentally equates to me working on my own project.

And Ring the Decibels is getting started on prototyping even earlier than originally intended. This morning, we brainstormed and screened solutions. During our screening, though, we started getting a lot of zeros. Rows and rows of zeros, luvs all the way across. Eventually, as we attempted to start Pugh scoring by defining our 5-scales, we realized our design project would benefit more from immediate prototyping, user-testing, and iterating instead. 

We start prototyping with Arduino code tomorrow. 

This time, I think I might actually like it. 

Luv, even.