Coding Diary

First Day of Online Coding Bootcamp

Jasmine Liu
Jul 24, 2017 · 4 min read

The horrific moment of appearing in video conference

I glance at the clock. It is 8:50am central time, one hour before eastern time. It seems that my first challenge in starting out an online coding bootcamp is remembering the time difference between Iowa and New York. As 9:00am approach, I close my bedroom door and sit down in front of my new work station setup specifically for the coding bootcamp. To my left is a simple Dell UltraSharp 17 inch external monitor, and to my immediate center a Macbook Air with a microphone and mouse attached. Nothing fancy, just functional necessities.

I feel outbursts of nervousness as my fight-or-flight instinct hit me hard. I was never a social butterfly, and my introverted self tend to be socially awkward while facing others, be it face-to-face or through video chat. But I know it is too late to turn back now. I decide to turn on Zoom…then bam! I am live for all to see. I quickly take in the scenario: my instructor just said hello, my five fellow peers are looking around nervously, and I see my mortified self staring back. I panicked, but seeing how friendly my instructor and classmates are, my heart beat gradually slowed as the class took off.

Blank as can be

Interestingly, the class begins with a pop exercise. Find the sum of this array…Right off the bat, I recall something vaguely from the prework exercises a few weeks back. What WAS it? I rack my brains and thought hard. It had something to do with each do. As I thought harder, blood rushes to my head. In that moment, my brain decides to forget almost everything I learned throughout the prework phase and reboot from ground zero. It wasn’t until later on when I realize that I am the panicky type of coder: my mind has the tendency to draw blank and stop working when coding under pressure. I silently wrote a note to myself to not freeze up again in a challenge exercise and keep my head leveled.

The coding setup in a nutshell

For the first day of class, we went over languages we will learn throughout the course including Ruby on Rails, JavaScript, SQL, HTML, CSS, and the VueJS framework. We also learned basic terminal commands in iTerm2, and familarizing ourselves with Sublime Text. Our instructor trained us to use Spectacle to organize the many windows we have open, then introduced us the Git & Github platform.

We also learned about coding soft skills, and how it can be even more important than the technical skills itself. If you happen to delete someone’s code by accident, it doesn’t matter how good of a coder you are; in the end, you will not work well in a team. And let’s face it: you will almost always be on a team.

Lastly we delve into blogging on Medium and creating a professional profile on LinkedIn. Our instructor taught us that a coder that blogs stands out from the crowd, and the ones who reaches out and network on LinkedIn are more likely to find a suitable job.

Blank as can be. Again.

Then came the unexpected surprise. It was another code challenge, but even harder this time. All I can say is, I lost my little reminder to myself earlier amongst the gibberish code running through my brain. I ran out of ideas to solve the problem, and when we were told we can use the web to help us, I didn’t even know what to Google. Twenty minutes later of fretting and agonizing, my brain decided to stop thinking and started asking random questions. What is wrong with me? What am I supposed to type? What keywords should I use? How much time do I have left? Am I being watched? To say the least, I didn’t write more than three lines of code. After the challenge, our instructor told us not to let coding get us down, because at the end of the day, there isn’t a day when developers think their code is perfect.

Aftermath

At the end of the day, I feel pretty bad about the challenge, not because I couldn’t finish it (we were told we probably couldn’t anyway), but because I know I could’ve done a lot better. After class, I decided to put my hands in the dirt amd take a break from coding. At night, I came back to my desk to work on the challenge and miraculously, it appeared to be easier. Which proves another point our instructor told us: breaks are miracles.

Looking ahead

All in all, my first day of online live class has been an unexpected one full of surprises, endless frustration, but bursts of excitement. My takeaway from today’s class:

  • I know I code awful when under pressure and stress.
  • Breaks are awesome and miracle workers.
  • I am not a horrible coder if my code breaks. It happens to everyone, and that’s why there are errors to point us in the right direction.

This concludes my blog post for the day. Thanks for reading everyone, and stay posted for more!

Jasmine Liu

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