Long time, no see.
| My Computer circa March 2017 |
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I started teaching myself to code in June of 2015, for reasons that aren’t as clear as they once were but are also not really important to me now. I jumped into Learn right in the beginning of January 2016 and started working through the material.
I have a job and kids and so I was sporadic, steady, steaming along, more or less making substantial progress. I wasn’t done in 4 months like I had hoped, but that was crazy talk; I needed to take my time to really understand what I was doing.
By August 2016 I had slowly pushed through the Rails lessons and was finally at my portfolio project. I had an idea for it and set aside a weekend to get started. Can you guess what happened? No? Well, then read on.
I had something come up. I didn’t get started. I was enrolled in a couple of classes at the community college (Linux and a netsec class if ya care) and, although they weren’t taxing, were starting to sit at the front of the line when I had a precioius few moments outside of work and parenting to spend on anything.
The portfolio project sat gathering dust. I’d forked a repo on git and added Devise to it but hardly much else.
A couple of months later I was gifted a new computer. Yay, right? But the new computer wasn’t yet configured like my old. It’s not a difficult thing to do, but now there was one more obstacle between me and jumping back into my project. Spending any time on it meant first configuring my computer and setting up preferences and downloading xcode updates and by god there are a lot of excuses that come pre-installed on this shiny new thing.
Then, just for fun, in January of 2017 I broke my right hand and was reduced to being a one-handed typist. I’d spent months improving my touch typing skills, even going so far as to black out the keys on my laptop. Now I couldn’t type much of anything on the right side of the keyboard without staring down and pecking at it. Yes, another wonderful excuse.
I wouldn’t be writing this if I didn’t finally get started again, but it wasn’t until the beginning of April 2017 until my hand was finally healed enought to be of use and when I finally locked myself away and forced myself to go through the process of setting up my environment.
I peeked at my portfolio project and, much to my surprise, found no mold growing. Code is good like that.
I remembered more than I thought I would and those things I remembered were comfortably settled into my brain. But sure, there have been a ton of embarassing things I have Googled (like how to generate an array of a sequence of numbers in Ruby, (new_array = [*1..n] where ‘n’ is the upper number of the range–like you didn’t know, you genius).
I’m not done yet, not with the Learn program, or my portfolio (although it’s really close), but also not with pushing along with the small-L ‘learning’ I started in June of 2015. It will be 2 years of learning to code in a couple of months, and it’s good for me to look back and see how far I’ve come. And I’m going to keep going.
Yeah, blah blah blah inspirational wrap-up goes here. I’m not big on Grand Life Lessons, but if you are like me then you hit times when you think about quitting this journey or some other one you are on, and you probably have some very good reasons why it’s a good idea. (See Generally, Everyone Is Younger And Smarter And Everything Is Meaningless So What’s The Point, publisher My Brain, 2000-2017).
| Look at these kids |
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| See? See how smart they are??? |
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I’m with you. I can’t say it makes any sense to continue when the clearest signs you see read “What The Hell Do You Think You Are DOING?”. (They have those signs around where I live–don’t know about where you live).
I can’t tell you it makes sense to keep going or that it is the right decision or that it feels better than quitting. I hate it when people tell me stuff like that when I’m ground down to a dust between life’s mortar and its pestle.
But I will say this: If you think I am a deluded fool because I am deciding to keep going, I’m inclined to agree. If you think YOU are a deluded fool because YOU are deciding to keep going, keep an eye out for me. There’s at least one other fool on the trail.
| We’ll look like this. It will be grand. |
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P.S. Did you notice the unpaired paren up there? Me too. I kept it because I like to think this post will throw an error…