After hitting that submit button, no longer was I too excited to do anything. However, still did I refresh my mom's inbox on April 20th for that email from Apple. Yes, I'm accepted again this year, but I don't feel the same sense of achievement as last year -- I tried so hard to advertise this scholarship, interrupted the CS classes at my school, wrote both a Chinese and English blog post in different ways and published on different platforms, encouraged those who wanted to give up along the way again and again, then why is it that I am the only person that is going this year, still? What did I do wrong? What can I do better? How would they trust me when I do the same next year?
Okay, too much negativities here. Let's look at what I did better this year. I actually submitted 2 minutes earlier than last year, nice. I finished all three articles and planned the structure of the playground beforehand, that's a good habit. I used an Xcode project for debugging purposes, which saved a lot of my time. And the most important part, I learned GameplayKit (by watching all the WWDC videos about it) and tried SpriteKit again. I'm not surprised when that document disappeared, the document which I failed to follow years ago. Good job, Apple.
However, all of these doesn't mean there is nothing else I can improve next year. First of all, I need to actually submit ON TIME, not like refreshing the page and starting to fill out the application at 7:59. That also means spending more time on the Playground to finish it earlier and spend time checking for errors (yes, I didn't assign the AI in one page and forgot to turn on rendered markup). Although it wasn't needed that much for this project, definitely conforming to CustomPlaygroundDisplayConvertible can improve the usability of the playground.
Anyways, thanks to all of you for helping me along the way, and hope that one day we'll be there in San Jose together. Don't ever give up!
Screenshots
