Day 19, 20, 21: The no-plan plan
>>> Brief overview
Warning → tl:dr == mostly despair.
I feel like I have been casting about sort of aimlessly for the past three days, taking lots of breaks and worrying a good bet. I’ve lost direction. I spent another 8 worthless hours on Friday not making a map that I could write any JavaScript about, and not finding any helpful tools about doing what I wanted to do. I even found a nice complete example someone else had made and was completely unable to copy it. I have no idea what I was doing the rest of the time I was awake and working, but let me assure you, it wasn’t pretty.
I tried to get myself a win over this weekend by going back to Python and writing out another question or two for the quiz, and I’ve sort of succeeded (I’ve got two questions generating and a third in the works on the same route, and the score function is now set up to scale for more questions, which is nice) but I still feels like a big failure because of the maps. I haven’t had a moment of joy from coding since I stepped away from that problem. I know that is the reality of a software engineer’s life, repeated micro-failures most of the time and once in awhile getting something right and then stepping forward (testing woot!), but there is a big emotional difference between failing and knowing what else to try (that’s really sort of nice failing, and exciting, and I could go forever like that, I love exploring!) and failing and not being able to figure out what to do next. That’s why working on something all alone is very, very hard. And I don’t like it one bit.
>>> Where I struggled
Reality is starting to terrorize me, quite frankly. We’ve been plinkety-plunk coding along at Hackbright in our nice safe bootcamp and repeatedly failing in a safe space, (and there’s no shortage of tears, let me assure you) but that’s all about to go away very soon. In three weeks, I’ll have to defend this hunk of flask routes and <div>s gone wild with a whopping 0% test coverage to a bunch of people who might, for some reason, consider employing me full-time to romp around spewing technical debt in their general direction for the next who-knows-how-many years of both our lives. And that reason they’ll have for employing me has got to be something I hand them over, neatly wrapped and well-named and coherent, which means I’ve got to have something nice and good to give. In three weeks.
Also, planning. I need to do a better job of saying “these are the two tiny things I’m going to knock out today, in this order” rather than opening up my app and just going at whatever I can get my hands on, because it’s too big for me now, too hairy, with too many legs. For everything I make on the back end, there’s JavaScript I’ve got to write on the front end to check it and clean it up and trust-but-verify the user’s intent. Lack of planning is definitely contributing to my feelings of despair at the prospect of finishing anything in a week. And a week! That’s all we’ve got left of the meaty programming (plus a few days for HTML/CSS). Ay, caramba. I was a project manager, for crying out loud. This was my bread and butter. Admittedly, I don’t much like bread, and I never loved being a project manager. But I should have known better. Lack of direction generally leads to dispair, or at least lack of fulfillment in your routine, and then lack of a routine, and then nothing is measurable. You have to line things up to count them easily and knock them down efficiently.
>>> Thoughtful takeaway
I recently heard a story about a software engineer talking to another group of bootcamp graduates, and the engineer was saying “the job market is pretty good for you all right now. There are lots of people out there writing crap code. You too, rest assured, can go out and be a bad coder. The bar is not that high.”
I’m not sure I exactly agree with that, because I suspect somehow that the engineering population is self-selected enough to have a naturally high bar in respect. However, I think the sentiment that everyone is terrible at the beginning, regardless of what they think of themselves, may not be so far off. At least I hope that’s the case.
Hopefully I can sneak in somewhere I’m by far the least experienced and worst engineer, and slowly learn and improve and cautiously march towards competency, as part of a dynamic team.
I tagged this post with “The Pit of Despair” which is sort of melodramatic, I know, but I think it’s the true thoughtful takeaway from today’s post. If you haven’t seen The Princess Bride, you’ve made a terrible mistake with any of your recent free time. The funny part about the Pit of Despair in that movie, and I suppose in my life, is that it’s really quite easy to get in and out.
