After sometime in coding.

Hi Pieter,

I can imagine what you're feeling at this exact moment and tell me if I'm correct or not: you feel you understand all the concepts of the Java language and you've completed Some or All Java courses on Treehouse but you don't know how to implement what you've learned since everything you've done had been in Workspaces (I'm assuming).

This feeling is completely normal and understandable, my solution for your problem would be:

1. Begin taking the Android Development courses on Treehouse (Associated with what you've learned)
2. On the side, in your free-time begin building/thinking of projects you would like to implement/build but! don't jump straight into the IDE, begin with outlaying your project in plain English.

For Example:

1. I want my program to do : A , B, C (while A , B , C = Features)
2. My program would solve problems : X, Y

And this while using only a pen & paper / note-taking app and start thinking how can you achieve these goals using Java's core concepts you've learned.

Hopefully I've helped you and solved your problem, If I didn't then I would love to hear from you on how can I help you further.

Best,

Shay Paustovskiy

Hi Pieter,

Unfortunately I don't know a lot of Java as well as Android Development. But what I do know is when you have a problem you can refer to 2 resources :

1. Treehouse Forums - With your specific problem and what goal you're trying to achieve
2. Android Dev Documentation.

I cannot stress this enough, as a programmer the documentation is the golden book of answers. If you can read documentation and you understand the syntax of the language in which you're trying to achieve that specific goal, then your'e GOLDEN

To help you out just a bit : Android Camera API

Hope I've helped you

Best,

Shay Paustovskiy

Hi Pieter. To add to what Shay has already said, remember that along with the Treehouse forum and the official documentation, you also have:

• the StackOverflow community
• Google codelabs
• numerous tutorials (articles, such as Medium, or YouTube videos)
• free courses from other MOOC to complete your training

There are plenty of resources out there to help you out.

As I understand, this is your end-of-year project, so don't stress now. Keep it in mind and keep learning. When you revisit it in a few weeks/months, it will make more sense. Just give yourself some time to acquire some skills and keep practicing with small projects. You can't know everything right from the start or you wouldn't be doing a course, you'd be teaching it :) Good luck!

Hi Pieter-Andries,

The situation you're in is not uncommon. You've learnt some language skills and tackled very specific problems. I would imagine, that if I asked you to write me a class (or classes) to model a car and its passengers you would be able to produce something. What if I asked you to add a method for adding and removing passengers from the car? We'll need some rules around this of course - how many seats does the car have, can people be added to the trunk, can anyone sit in the driver's seat?

I suspect you could produce me a console app that did all of this.

Often in programming we are faced with challenges we have never seen before. There is a trick to it - you break the problem down into small tasks, then you break those tasks down again into smaller components, and you use the skills you've used to solve other problems previously (and probably learn one or two along the way).

So the car was easy, right? The camera example is not so different.

We need to connect to the andriod API for the camera or gallery and get something back, we need to then add things to what we display to the user, so we need to model those things - stickers and dates.

Start off with placeholders for everything, and write little programs that just solve a simple problem and then stictch them all back together into your solution.

Here's a quick breakdown of one of your requirements into tasks, you might break it down differently and that's fine, this is just how I would approach it:

After a picture is taken, add some stickers

• Store a picture somewhere (we don't actually have to store a real image, we can just create a dummy class that returns dimensions for the next dotpoint)
• Get the dimensions of the screen and/or the stored picture - determine the working space for adding stickers
• What is a sticker? It's probably another image right?
• Build a dummy library of three "sticker" images, a square, a circle, and a triangle
• Display a blank screen to the user
• Add a "sticker" menu to the screen
• Add our stickers to the sticker menu
• Allow a sticker to be tapped, making it the active sticker
• Allow the screen to be tapped, adding a sticker to the working space we determined earlier
• Allow us to "deselect" the current sticker by tapping on an X or cancel button

There's probably more things you can think of and each of those tasks needs to be broken down further into how you're actually going to build them in code. The next level of breakdown tends to be the instructions you get in a treehouse course. The treehouse exercises don't say "add a menu" they say "We are going to build a menu, create an empty class called "newMenu", now add three menu items" they worry about displaying the menu later on, you need to start somewhere and you need to know where you're going.

I hope I have understood the part you are struggling with and that this helps. Moving from small coding exercises to full blown projects is quite hard the first time, you need to do a different type of problem solving. Feel free to ask any further questions.

Good luck!