Eureka!

It’s amazing to believe I’ve been coding for just over 5 months now. When I first started I truthfully didn’t think I could do this. I was more so just doing this because I had nothing to lose but a wealth of knowledge if I could some how pull it off.

Yet as I made my way through the pre-work I found an intriguing fascination with completing each lab. The feeling of learning is a rollercoaster of emotions on its own but when you’re being exposed to a world you’ve never encountered before, it’s different. It’s like visiting a new country on the other side of the world.

Everything is a magic trick but in programing you find out how to do the trick as well! Although as I kept making my way through maybe, about 2 months in I started to think about the end game. How does this compute to all the application, websites, video games and so on that make up the world? This can’t be all… oh no it wasn’t, it’s a never ending worm hole but there is a light at the end of the tunnel.

The people you meet along the way, the long nights of banging your head against the brick wall just to find out you misspelled a word the next morning. Sometimes finding your groove and going into “code mode” where the lines seem to just spill out, it’s an entire journey.

As you go along gaining more and more knowledge you gain confidence even being able to help other people not make the same mistakes you had to. There’s no better feeling helping someone dodge a major bullet in their code or teaching someone something that took you forever to understand.

All in all I can proudly say I’m no longer afraid of programming. In fact I’ve even begun to embrace it over the course of Flatiron. The moments of struggle are the moments of the most growth as a software engineer, as a person. Learning to coupe with failures and using them as stepping stones to the right answer is almost poetic; philosophical even.

As we enter the fourth phase I can’t help but to reflect on how far I’ve come from what feels like just yesterday. Rounding out the year knowing I’ve made the right decision for my life.