Wading Through the Tall Grass
The inspiration for todays edition was birthed from a reflective stroll around my former home. Gazing into the overgrown garden of waist-high grass, flowers, weeds and thorns, I found myself tying a rather strong metaphorical comparison between three things. My learning journey, the fear of the unknown and, well, tall grass.
A phrase that almost everyone would have heard at some point is “The hardest part is starting”. Starting, by definition, being a prerequisite to the core of any escapade means that its importance is unquestionable. And yes, in some instances conjuring the motivation to tackle an obstacle is an obstacle in itself. But, my recent adventures have led me to believe there are parts of a journey that require more perseverance, willpower and trust than a beginning.
With the numerous people I’ve met through the last few months often asking the same question: “How is your bootcamp?” or “What has been the hardest part about it?” My common response has been the ability to learn with others. Now although this is what almost everyone does throughout the years of their youth with nursery, school and often university — the application here is slightly different. Because of the emphasis on practical driven learning, alongside pair/mob programming being standard practice, many who were often working together had different levels of understanding when applying. This was challenging, since it required an individual who may not understand to communicate this, and required the patience and capability of others to sufficiently explain. Now I’ll leave my brief explanation of my answer there. Since upon reflection, there was one thing that was considerably harder than learning to learn with others. And much harder than starting a journey too. For me, the biggest challenge in this journey and many others in my life, has been pushing through that barrier into the unknown.
Being someone who’s always been intrigued by the why, I’ve often found myself battling the unexpectedly destructive paradox that is “paralysis by analysis”. Now I would argue that being a ‘why’ individual mainly consists of benefits. It promotes deeper understanding, both conceptually and contextually and can often allow deeper logical reasoning. However, its over these ‘why’ individuals that this fear of the unknown shadows the most.
For my time on my bootcamp I instilled *almost* all of my trust into the leaders and mentors.I listened and learned and followed their approaches and the mentalities they encouraged as closely as possible. But after our mid-course project the pace started picking up rapidly. We brushed quickly through new and (at the time) daunting topics such as Authentication, type annotations with Typescript and NoSQL databases such as Couchbase. Often the beckoned approach was to read the docs and contextual info, push through some application and learn by failure, or rather by navigating unsuccessful attempts to reach success. But in these moments, during the short stints of learning new topics, it was particularly challenging to blindly follow this method.
After enduring a few days of frustration and facing rapid transitions to new topics, myself and a number of others felt disheartened, unmotivated and a little lost. Going into the final weeks of learning with this new added weight on our backs was tricky, but with the continuous support and reassurance from the staff, the feeling settled going forward.
Contrastingly, my later reflections back on the course differ from my emotions during. Due to the fast-paced nature of the bootcamp, the approach that was taken was in my eyes the best it could have been. It opened us up to new concepts and technologies, before going into our final projects. Giving us some hands on experience so that approaching similar concepts in a short 5 weeks of building a product, would be less daunting and manic. Similarly, considering the short time spent on each topic, we managed to create some pretty cool projects and now with more time on my hands, I’ll be iterating through a couple of different tech stacks on the projects I take part in, to find what works best for me.
The structure of my posts is still a little hazy, but I’ve been doing a little bit of reflecting and always trying to add my pea-sized nugget of wisdom at the end for anyone who may have some use of it. So first I’ll say a big thanks to the mentors at School of Code, for the continuous reassurance and patience with myself and the other students. It takes persistence from both ends to ensure a good learning experience and a feeling of safety for the students, and in the end, my experience on the bootcamp has been incredible. Finally for those who are sifting for that little shiny golden nugget, sometimes its okay to be unsure. If you can trust in your ability to navigate a situation, be it learning or not, stick tight to that trust and ride the wave a little. Understanding can sometimes come a little later, sometimes, to reach an understanding you need to immerse yourself within the situation first. So go ahead and learn, apply as much as possible. Try not to get your head stuck in tutorial mode, sometimes a do-first approach may clarify a little more, and it’ll definitely embed that knowledge a little deeper too.
