Breaking brain

So coding school is…intense. Going in, I compared it to pastry school, in that it was short and quick and the intent was to get you working. The thing that I didn’t think about was that I knew how to make a cake before I went to pastry school. Four weeks ago, I didn’t know a damned thing about coding, outside of the abstract, at least.

This shit is hard. Really hard. It’s like having to learn a new language and then do math in that new language. It’s important to note here that I always sucked at foreign language. I took German so many times with so much patience from my teacher, Frau Pow. It’s also worth noting that I grew up in an army household and I was living in Germany during high school. Even though I was getting the worst grades that I ever got in high school in German, I could still go to downtown Wiesbaden and clumsily communicate with actual Germans. It helps that my communication “Ein bier, bitte.”, is pretty damned hard to muck up. But trying to speak german to a German at least puts another human at the other end of the conversation. A human that can parse my broken syntax and attempt to put it back together in a way that makes something close to sensible speech. Computers are complete dicks, though. They refuse to try to understand what you’re trying to tell them. If you don’t put parentheses where you were supposed to put quotation marks, they won’t even try.

The concepts that we are learning, they all make sense in the abstract, in the classroom, I get them. Once I get that part of the day where it’s my turn to try to write code, putting my thoughts in the right order is my biggest struggle. Staring at this screen trying to puzzle out the correct order…it’s like trying to put together a jigsaw puzzle where you can’t look at the edges of the piece, nor the face of the piece, but you have a real good idea of what the picture is.

I remain undeterred, at the moment, but around the second or third hour of staring at this screen, trying to put together the edgeless puzzle pieces…gah. Just gah.