Week 1 at NSS — Wrap-up

What a week! I learned more this last week than I have learned in a long time. I feel accomplished and lost all at the same time. I came home feeling pretty discouraged on Friday. At about 2:00 p.m. my brain shut down, not joking. I couldn’t process anything. One of my classmates, @jbrooks036, was trying to explain For Loops to me and I couldn’t grasp any part of it. That’s when I knew my brain was overloaded. So I started to question myself. If my brain is overloaded on day 5, what does that tell me about the next 6 months? BUT — then I thought about what John Wark, founder of Nashville Software School, said on day 1. He said at the end of each week look back at what you learned, not what you got stuck on, but what you know now that you didn’t 5 days earlier. Oh my gosh! I know how to work on a virtual terminal, I know file management, I understand ip addresses, I know the data types in JavaScript, I know variables, I know Git and how to use GitHub, and that is only to name a few.

My teacher @chyldmedford said something towards the end of last week that helped. He said that yes, he will be giving us tons of homework, but it is up to us to decide when and how and if to work on it. He knows we have families and jobs and lives outside of this, but that what he is assigning us is for us, to help us. This class is going to keep rolling with or without us and it is our responsibility to understand it and stay caught up. So while he will not be collecting our homework, or grading us on what we have accomplished, we NEED to know this stuff to become ninja programmers. So basically he took the pressure off, and then loaded it back on tenfold. He is right though. We are all here by choice, this is what we want to do. We don’t want to come out of this being “pretty good programmers” we want to be ninjas! It is up to us to do the work, put in the time and come out being the best we can be. He is giving us the tools……you get what I am saying.

Well, it’s back to studying For Loops and While Loops, Switch Statements, Functions and Arrays. I need to be ready because come Monday we are on to package.json, gitignore, jshintrc, Gruntfile and JS: JSON. What the what?