A week of gut punches and reality checks...yes and its only the second week of the course.
Yesterday's dumpster-fire of a homework assignment did have a bit of good news to go along with the bad (the bad being that it was incomplete and late). The assignments I did manage to complete were correct. Rather, the code worked. It was not efficient, sleek code. It was a jumbled mess of JS methods and if/else statements. But it did work and that is the most important thing right now. And that brings me to the main lesson of this week, which was brought to my attention today.
Trust in the process.
All week I've been getting my nuts stepped on and handed to me in the form of difficult homework assignments and self-doubt. I watched other students breeze through parts of assignments where I couldn't get anywhere. I was pretty sure that my wake-up call was coming this weekend, especially after that insane homework assignment.
Let's back up a bit first...
Growing up, I always did pretty good in school. Once I hit high school, my grades started to dip a bit but still respectably above average (except for college Botany...goddamn plants making my life miserable). My major was in Biology and Chemistry, which are challenging subjects. But they are mostly memorization. Programming is an applied science with a different kind of learning curve. Its not about remembering electron valences or the endocrine pathway. It is about recognizing a real-world problem and writing code within a set of rules to solve that problem. It is a practical type of learning.
That was part of the challenge of this program: recognizing that I'm not just learning new things, but I'm learning them in a new way. And I was pretty convinced that my brain was molded over the years to resist that kind of thinking. Would I be forced to spend the final half of my life resigned to my fate?
Today I had my 1o1 sessions with my instructors and it turns out that I'm not a functioning imbecile after all. In fact, I'm doing quite well and right where I should be as far as my aptitude goes. My instructors are not worried, so I won't be either. I'll just focus on one thing at a time and keep working hard.
Like today's 12-hour coding marathon. I didn't think I'd ever have fun spending a Friday night in a room working on a homework assignment with classmates. I never did that when I was in college. But tonight was pretty cool. And the weekend assignment that was freaking me out at 10am is close to halfway complete already. Funny thing is that this assignment is very similar to last weekend's huge project that I didn't finish until late Sunday night.
So yeah. Trust in the process. Keep coding. And take the time every once in awhile to look back and recognize how far you've come. Good life advice in general.
