One Month Down — NSS

One month down and 5 to go. It has been a rough month. Total roller coaster of emotions. I almost don’t recognize myself. I cry, I curse, I feel stressed to the max most days and I question my decision to become a programmer almost every day. I have learned so much, yet I’m far from understanding what we are doing. I felt pretty comfortable with CSS and HTML before starting the class, but so much has been packed into my brain since then that I don’t remember anything! I have to dig through virtual machines, VIM and it’s many shortcuts, Tmux, Github, Node, JavaScript — for loops, while loops, arrays, strings, variables, etc… — , importing/exporting, Grunt, JShint, EJS, Mongodb, Morgan, Express, node modules, Package Json, Travis, Trello, APIs and Apigee, Lowdash, Coveralls, Web servers, pair programming, testing — Mocha and Chai — asynchronous & synchronous functions, and many other things just to remember how to color the background of a page.

Why am I not getting it? I meet with study groups, I work with a tutor, I do the Team Treehouse and CodeSchool tracks, I review the assignments and redo the ones that I struggled with. I can tell you what almost all those things that I listed above do and I can follow along as Chyld explains an assignment (most of the time) but give me an assignment to do and I don’t even know where to begin. It is so frustrating. Do I belong here? Will I ever get it? Sorry for sounding like a big, whiny baby. I just have to get it off my chest so I can pick myself up and get back to work.

The whining stops now!

Time to get back to the books. I am reading “Head First HTML and CSS”. It promises to help your brain retain the information it provides so I’m digging in. I need to show up Monday with my styling technique guns a blazing! I also need to freshen up a few of the apps we worked on last week; make the changes necessary to make them work, pretty them up and get them up to Github. If only days were 30 hours long instead of the stupid 24 hours we are given each day.

Well Monday starts month two and in typical Chyld fashion the week is maxed out with Hapi/Kraken/Sails, partials, map, foreach, filter, Bootstrap, Foundation, Pure, Inheritance, Less, Require.js, Controllers(revisit) and lodash(also a revisit). I can’t help but be excited to see what all of this is and that excitement answers the questions above of “do I belong here?” and “will I ever get it?” I do, and I will because I am still excited to learn it. We are learning from the best and he has a proven track record of getting students where they need to be to land good, if not great jobs when they are done. I just need to keep my chin up and trust him to do the same for me — and study my butt off.