Errors teach us things
Student Spotlight | Ashley Laurel Mikkola shares how she is finding learning to code and what mistakes can teach us.
I left the US for the crowded streets of Europe for the first time almost ten years ago now. Whilst studying my first degree in International Economics, I bounced back and forth between the shores of Lake Michigan to the sea-swept coastline of Schleswig-Holstein. I eventually moved across the channel to study a Translation post-graduate course in Portsmouth until finally landing in a small (and very land-locked) town on the Surrey-Hampshire border with my first “proper” job.
I, eventually, signed up for the Web Development Foundations course at 23 Code Street, primarily, because if I’m unable to find a more advanced and better-paid position than they can offer here in the middle-of-nowhere Surrey I’ll have to leave the country at the end of the year.
Over the course of my life, I’ve taken a few wrong turns and I’ll be the first to admit that I’m not immune from mistakes. Some days, it seems like I can’t do anything right; I’m told that I was born in the wrong country, that I earned the wrong degrees, that I speak the wrong English and I love the wrong way. All that being said, if I’ve learned one thing from the past three months here at 23 Code Street it’s that errors are there to tell us things.
Sometimes, there are things that we need to be told about ourselves. Maybe, I often mess up the correct number of curly brackets in my JavaScript, maybe I do drink way too much coffee, and maybe I’ll never really use my university degrees, but this is all feedback I can take on board. I can track down the missing curly bracket. I can, albeit reluctantly, cut back on the cappuccinos. I can sign up for courses like this one and acquire a whole host of different and interesting skills.
But sometimes errors are there to reveal the limitations of the system at large. Maybe the code that I’ve written perfectly won’t display properly in a certain browser. Maybe the DJ isn’t taking requests, and maybe it’s not possible to claim that there wasn’t anybody else equally as qualified for the job. But that doesn’t mean I can’t rewrite the code to be cross-browser compatible. There’s at least a handful of DJs out there that won’t roll their eyes at me when I ask them to play “Paranoid” first by Post Malone, and two pints later the same title again by Kanye West. Finally, there’s bound to be a vacancy out there that perfectly complements the flavours of my unlikely blend of skills.
Even if after this course my coding skills are still considered by more seasoned programmers to be questionable at the very best, the biggest take away from this course will be that errors are there to tell us things. I’d even go so far as to say they are there to teach us things. We all make mistakes; it’s just part of being human. However, when it’s all said and done it’s always going to be up to us to interpret them correctly and determine how best to overcome them.
I can’t thank the entire team at 23 Code Street enough for helping me to come to this realization. And yes that’s realization with a “z”; in programming, it’s American English that’s proper.
If you’re interested in learning to code and studying with us, you can find out more about our courses here.
