This post is from a brief-lived wordpress site, originally posted on 18 December 2020. I’m moving it here, because I want to track my coding progress all in once place.
Up until this point in my life I have considered myself a creative and intelligent person. Problematic discourse aside, I definitely self-identify as a Ravenclaw — specifically, I see a lot of myself in Luna Lovegood. She’s weird, loves investigating things, is willing to believe in almost anything, and has questionable taste in earrings. To that end, when coding was described to me as a creative endeavor, and one that involved solving challenges, my interest was piqued. Sure, it was completely different from anything I had previously done in my career, but it looked interesting and engaging, which is something wasn’t finding on my current career path.
Anyway, long story short, and I’ve thrown myself into coding. I did the first SheCodes workshop, where I dipped my toe into the pond that is front end coding (think of front end coding as the stuff that you see — how this website it set up, for example. The font, the layout, the buttons — this is front end code. They include coding languages such as HTML, CSS, and JavaScript) and discovered I enjoyed it! With the goal of making this skill career-able, I did some research and discovered Makers, a coding bootcamp that would teach me Ruby, a back end code. Huzzah and tally ho! “Let’s do it!” I thought to myself, and powered onward.
Let me say this: I really like figuring out how code works. It is an amazing feeling when I suss out the solution to a particularly tricky problem.
Let me also say this: NOT being able to figure out code is REALLY FRUSTRATING.
So since delving into the precourse at Makers (the four weeks of learning stuff BEFORE the real bootcamp begins), I have experienced a roller coaster ride of emotions. Sometimes I feel brilliant and that I understand and I am so happy that I’ve decided to go down this path. Sometimes I feel like an idiot and that nothing makes sense and why on Earth am I doing this to myself??
When I start feeling this way, I try to remind myself of the message from this Carol Dweck TED Talk:
I am not a coding genius…yet!
As my fiancé said when I was feeling particularly frustrated with myself — I’ve only been doing this for about a month. If I had started learning French a month ago and then was upset because I wasn’t fluent, that would be ridiculous. I am in the midst of learning. I am not an expert and I don’t know everything, and that’s okay. What’s important to do is:
- Don’t forget that I’m learning.
- Don’t forget that learning means not knowing some things, and then putting in the effort into figuring those things out.
- That I shouldn’t compare myself to other people. Some people have coded before and understand a fundamental thing about how coding works, and they might seem like they’re ahead of me. That’s okay.
So to sum up this first blog post, I will say that I’m excited and slightly terrified about what the next few months will bring. No matter what, I’m glad I’ve decided to give it a crack, because what is life if you’re not trying new things? Huzzah and tally ho!
