All the irons in the fire, and then some

Adam Shanley
Jul 20, 2017 · 6 min read

It’s pretty rare when there are times that I feel overwhelmed, yet still energetic and excited at the same time. But that is where I’m at at this moment.

I should clarify: that is where I’m at with my programming endeavors. In my actual day to day life it’s a completely different story. Long story short is that I have a lot of life stuff happening at the same time and it is making it difficult to make progress toward my learning goals every day. Regardless, I’m persisting and haven’t let a day go by where I haven’t learned something that I didn’t know the day before, and practiced to make those skills stronger.

Right now it is the penultimate week of the MID edx course that I’m taking (Introduction to Computer Science and Programming with Python). I know that that class has 100% made me a better programmer, and logical thinker. It was (and still is) probably the most challenging course that I’ve had to take, and it’s shaping up to be the most rewarding as well. I know that if I were to go back and take the class again (which I’m planning on doing) I would struggle a lot less with some of the problems, and get a lot more out of it. The point is though that I’ve been able to form a broad base of knowledge thanks to the course. I’ve downloaded and saved all of the course handouts and videos to my computer, and just about filled an entire notebook with notes, code examples, and pseudocode.

That’s only one part of the puzzle though, as I’ve been basically collecting articles on this site by bookmarking everything that seems to be pointing me in a good direction. The one that is sticking with me right now is “New Developer? You Should Have Learned Git Yesterday”. As I mentioned in my introductory post, my friend including signing up for a GitHub account as one of the first things that I should do. As soon as I started writing some code I went to GitHub and stupidly thought “Oh, I’ll just slap this code up there and start a collection” without realizing that there was some learning curve involved. Granted, it’s a rather small learning curve, but I have just been focusing on the MIT class so much that I haven’t left myself any time to really get into it. Also, see above re: life stuff. Life happens and it’s impossible to do everything at once sometimes, as much as I hate to admit it. But then I came across another article that got me excited about GitHub, and makes me want to dive in with both feet right now: “A Step by Step Guide to Making Your First GitHub Contribution.”

That last link gets me excited for a few reasons. First, it’s the perfect place to start. I love whenever I can just immediately start getting involved in a community, and when that community is encouraging someone to learn. It helps me feel less overwhelmed by giving me some sort of foothold. Secondly, my absolute favorite thing that I’ve come to realize since starting my coding journey is that education seems to be paramount. From my perspective, and coming out of an academic environment, it seems that everything is considerably less insular. The environment seems to be inviting and not exclusive, and it seems to value more what one knows and not necessarily who one knows. Everyone seems to want others to succeed and to be part of something–to be part of the community at large. A great example of this is that I joined the Slack channel for Nashville Developers (NashDev) and literally immediately after introducing myself I received a DM from someone who said that they would love to meet me and have a talk, and that I should check out the company that they are working with (and I did and it’s so great). Before my first 24 hours on that Slack channel I had 3 more invites to meet up in real life and discuss things. That is great, and definitely not something I ever came across in the world of academia.

Going off of that, it is absolutely astounding how every day I am coming across more and more opportunities to learn, and to learn for free. Everywhere I turn there are people who have put together computer science programs from freely available content online. I mean, this article alone: “460 Free Online Programming & Computer Science Courses You Can Start in July” is just crazy, and inspiring, and I want to take all 460 courses right now.

And although I don’t necessarily understand 100% of what is being discussed in some of the many articles that I read every day on this site, I am taking it all in just like someone learning a new language. Basically that is what I’m doing anyway. I’m immersing myself in a new culture, in a new world really, and every time I come across something that I don’t know (which right now is constantly) I make a note of it to read more about it and I move on. It’s like anything else where you have to find your own way in. Sometimes it takes a lot of rooting around, but then once you have that first breakthrough there’s nothing that can stop you.

Alas, my to-do list is already quite long. Toward the top of that list is regularly contributing to GitHub (as my account sits untouched right now since April. I believe that if you find my profile an actual tumbleweed will roll across the screen). After that, I have a project to work on at FreeCodeCamp; my first project using HTML/CSS/Bootstrap/JQuery. I’m excited about that because it’s going to be something creative, and I’m going to be able to take some time to make it look great and exactly how I want it to. When I’m done with that I’ll be able to post all the code to my GitHub. Win-win all around.

What is most exciting right now (I feel like I’ve said everything is “the most exciting.” Sorry about that. I don’t mean to channel Jimmy Fallon or something, because he’s always saying “Oh man! That guy is the BEST!” about everyone. But I digress) is that last month I applied to be a fellow at the Data Incubator, and I received an email the other day saying that I have progressed to the semi-finals. Apparently less than one-in-four people move on to the semi-final round, and I can’t believe it, but it’s true. So I have to spruce up the ol’ resumé, and get ready to dive into the challenges that I’m going to have to complete over the weekend. If all goes well (fingers crossed) I can move on to the finalist stage. I have to think of a project that I want to propose to them though, as that is part of the challenge that I have to complete this weekend. Right now I have a general idea of wanting it to be education related, but I really need to think on that to really craft something special and something that I am passionate about.

Another thing that I am moving up on my list of things to do is learning linear algebra. Since beginning my journey into coding I have come to the realization that I actually love math. Maybe it has something to do with the kinds of music analysis that I have been doing for the past several years. I love learning how things work is the best way that I can put it in general. I have been working on Khan Academy off and on for the past several years, and recently have been increasing my time spent with it. My plan, originally, was to get through their entire math program. I wanted to move all the way from Kindergarten math to derivatives, and beyond. I may have to streamline that process though for economy’s sake. I have an unshakable belief that one is never too much of an expert on anything that they can’t benefit from studying the fundamentals. That was my thinking when starting out on my math journey there.

I need to dedicate an entire other post to my love of education, and my beliefs on free education for all. Right now though I’ll finish up this post by saying that I’m already looking forward to what it is that I might learn tomorrow, or what avenues my reading may take me down. I’m overwhelmed, sure, but I’m not daunted.

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Adam Shanley
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