The Minimax Algorithm is my Boyfriend Now

You can find the code here: https://github.com/Yasmin-A95/tictactoe

Week 3 of my software engineering immersive: design a tic-tac-toe program from scratch. No HTML or CSS to speak of, our first from-the-ground-up project. Jesus help me.

Day 1: Furiously writing notes from my living room office; class is on zoom today for "Digital Nomad Monday". The plan: get the MVP done as soon as possible and with the least hitches I could manage so that I could stop the evil voices claiming I'd never be able to finish it and that I'd made a terrible mistake by signing up for General Assembly.

Day 2: I awoke from the haze of anxious planning after said two days in a sea of ripped-up sketchbook paper with a headache and a terrible pain in my neck from crouching amongst my precious papers and hissing at the delivery people who had come to make sure I don't get scurvy. Zoom again today as my class had to quickly change the plans from "Digital Nomad Monday" back in class by Tuesday, to "All Zoom All the Time!!" when a classmate got Covid.

Day 3: time to put fingers to the keyboard and get this thing off the ground.

Day 3 (2 h 2 m): Cry because nothing is working; I can't even console log. What the heck is going on?

Day 3 (4 h 30m): Oh yeah I wrapped my entire program in a render function and then never called that function. Gah! Why am I like this?

Day 4: Yay! It's done, it works, life is good! What to do next? I might skip all the css extra for now since I've focused on that in previous homework and feel pretty comfortable with it. Let's go for the unbeatable algorithm challenge.

Day 5: I have an Algorithm that randomly generates moves from the wins array full of arrays. Now how do I go about getting it to analyse that array further and pick the next available move from a win that uses its previous move. My head spins trying to pseudo code that. Time to get some guidance.

My instructor has a look at my code and is surprised at how fancy I'm making it, which was a nice way of saying I overcomplicated something that could have been pretty simple. Since I'm doing something complicated anyway, he says, I should try and implement the minimax algorithm. I'd looked at that on day 4 and dismissed it as confusing, but I tell him I'll have another look. "It's a hard thing to implement, don't be mad if it doesn't work. Try to have fun!" (paraphrasing). Spoiler, I was mad.

Day 5 (6 h 6 m 6 s): I'm once again in a sea of notes. I'm ready to start trying to implement this thing.

Day 5 (9h): it's not working I am mad, back to the note-taking.

Day 5 (12 h 12 m): It's time for bed. It didn't work, I am sad about that. Importantly though, I'm for the first time amazed at how beautiful code can be designed, and instead of feeling dazed and confused after a long slog of endlessly fixing bugs and retiring to nurse my wounds, I'm feeling refreshed and sharp. It was somehow the most enjoyable failure of my life, and I think that with some time and guidance I'll be able to successfully implement it now that I understand it so much more deeply. Galaxy brain Yasmin is just around the corner, I can sense it.