This post details some of my experience in the Firehose Project.

I finished Nomster last week and was ready to keep learning at a break-neck pace. The Object Oriented Programming lessons appeared on my dashboard and I got coding along with Ken. After the finishing the videos, I wanted to test out my newly learned skills and started work on the first Image Blur coding challenge.

From the description, it seemed like a light warm up compared to what was going to come in Image Blur 2 and 3, and I thought I would breeze through it in a matter of minutes. After all, I had been doing similar (and many more difficult) challenges for weeks through both Code Abbey and Code Wars. Instead, I spent a frustrating hour trying to figure out what I was doing wrong.

Image Blur 1 was the first time that I built a class to solve a problem. Normally, I would just create a method or two and go from there. I built the Image class, defined my initialize and output_image methods in the class, created a new instance of Image, called output_image on it, and then got this error:

wrong number of arguments (1 for 0)

What do you mean, wrong number of arguments?! I fiddled around with my code, I googled, I banged my head in frustration against my desk. What was wrong?! What had I missed??

I stepped away from my code for a few minutes, hoping for some subconscious clarity. Upon returning, I finally realized the fatal flaw: I hadn’t defined initialize, I defined initalize. Notice the slight, one letter difference. I fixed it and the code ran perfectly.

I believe it was on Reconcilable Differences that John Siracusa mentioned that it’s often the variables or elements that you are most sure of that cause the errors in your code. After I experienced this, I fully agree with him. If you’re getting an error, always check what you are most sure of. I bet you’ll find something you missed.