Flatiron’s third week had just begun, the pace was hectic - overwhelming. Like a Hell-week of sorts. The amount of work I had cranked out is impressive to me even now after four weeks. If I could take time to do some review, I would be 20 lessons ahead of something that I thought was extremely hard previously. If I go back now, I can often pass tests in minutes that I spent hours on. I am genuinely proud of myself. The more code I write, the more confidence I gain. I have found myself jumping in to help answer questions. Even when I do not know the answer immediately, the challenge of trying to figure it out is very exciting.
Sometimes classmates would get frustrated. They just want to be told the answer and I get it. But I came here to do sit ups and run far. Coding sit-ups that is. Navy Seal Jocko Willink says: “There is no easy way. If you want to be better, be better. The short cut is a lie.” Meaning, you need to do the work. My coding mentor says he isn’t that smart, (I disagree) but that he just made a million mistakes and learned from them.
Now that week four is over and my first major project is complete. I remember that It was only days ago I laughed at writing “puts ‘hello world’.” into the terminal.
Minutes ago - I submitted a ruby gem that accesses one of my favorite websites and scrapes price information that I am personally interested in and returns it in a format not available through the Shopify website (everything under $100) that I find more useful.
With the click of a button, my CLI program shows the user what inventory is in or out of stock, provides me with all the lowest priced items from product categories that interest to me. It lets me open up the specific low-price items web page that I may want to buy right from the command line. It was 3 weeks ago that I was struggling to understand syntax. Oh – and I forgot to mention that there is additional secret functionality that “self-destructs” the app, displays terminal animation from a gif images converted to ASCII art, links to my previous projects, “rick-rolls” you if you try to access the hidden menu incorrectly - and has a hidden Easter egg referencing the first videogame I ever beat as a kid.
Did I mention that I just started to code a month ago?
