| Workin’ Day and Night |

Here’s a live look at our protagonist, live from his apartment in Oakland, CA:

Captain’s Log… Day 2485202421 in lockdown…

I’m well into my 3rd week of the full-stack development bootcamp offered by Coding Dojo, here in Oakland. Here are some of my preliminary thoughts about things so far.

• People are really interesting. Folk come from all walks of life.
• You never know what you know, until you’re tested (wait, now school makes so much sense, dammit!)
• you never know what you’re capable of until you do it
• man, my fingertips are sore.
• I need a new computer.

In all honesty, I would not say it’s back breaking, but it’s definitely not something that you should step into lightly. My general schedule is getting together with my cohort on zoom at 9am and then working on all kinds of assignments and making things until the wee hours of the evening a lot of times. I have rarely seen my bed before the hour of midnight since starting this thing. I mean, last week alone, I think I fully coded up at least 6 webpages alone. This does not include fun jquery things like this madness:

https://justinvsmith.github.io/dojo_assignments/Web_Fundamentals/jquery/pokedex/pokedex.html

However, you might be asking yourself, Isn’t this something that you’ve wanted to do for a long time?! Are you not enjoying yourself?

To that, I’d reply, STOP JUDGING ME.

*AHEM*

I mean, thanks for your concern friend. Yes, I have been wanting to jump into this for a long time. Yes a CRAZY word circumstance was all it took for me to go ahead and make the jump. I would say it’s a great time. I know that sounds kinda weird. I’m not going to lie to you. I’ve had great a many evenings, being stuck on some permutation of how to re-order pieces of data in an array. I’ve had many many choice words for Python, that have me feeling grateful that I’m living by myself (who wants to hear a stream-of-consciousness rant laden with curse words?). I have definitely had moments where I felt like I was never going to be cut out for another 12 weeks of this kind of madness. If i had to fail at one more algorithm challenge, i might just have to ask for a refund, because I’m not going to get very far this way.

The really funny thing is that I can’t actually imagine myself doing anything else right now. As frustrating as computers can be, I constantly wake up wanting to see what’s next. I am excited to figure out the problems for the day, or to see what kind of algorithmic alchemy I’m going to be asked to perform that day. Sometimes, the days go amazingly (today was a reasonably good day!), sometimes, they’re not exactly what I’ve imagined they would be, but it’s all just good experience. I really have to learn to be in a place where it’s ok to learn.

I’m going to have these same feelings when I get to starting a new job. I hate the feeling of not being in control/on top of something that I’m working on. It makes me feel so small or stupid when I am not able to quickly grasp things. However, I have a track record of being ridiculously hard on myself and thankfully, I have friends that are checkin’ up on your boy, to make sure that he’s not tearing his hair out. One of my favorite friends has reminded me that it’s just like being in college again. I have to be patient to learn the things I’m supposed to be learning. If I already knew these things, I wouldn’t have to be paying for the knowledge that I’m getting. Oh friends, such wisdom.

I find myself thinking about those days where I would sit with my wide open HTML book, back in the days ( I think I was about 13). I would stay up into the wee hours of the night, figuring out the tags and trying to get a page made. I’m still that silly lil nerdy boy, excited about creating things on the web, now it’s just a little bit more serious, but all the fun is still there (Even when making pages from 2013, like this one:

https://justinvsmith.github.io/dojo_assignments/Web_Fundamentals/html/portfolio/portfolio.html

All in all, I’m having some ups and downs, but I’m learning a lot and this could be the beginning of some real interesting things. I guess we’ll see what happens.