Somewhere to hang my coat
The first part of my coding bootcamp is now nearly at a close. I still can’t quite believe how much my cohort and I have learned. It’s incredible to see that we went from completing labs to now building an actual piece of software — a simple command line-interface program — in only a couple of weeks.
The first week was tough. I knew it was going to be hard, but what I hadn’t considered was the degree to which I would have to break down my concept of who I thought I was and reconsider who I was becoming. The inner demons of ‘this is not you’ can feel like ‘this is not for you’. Every little error message at this point felt like a tiny stab wound. Every time one would creep up (and they do often) was to imagine the error message coming from a little smiling face like a Sarah Anderson comic to prevent myself from throwing my computer out the window.
After week one, what came from this was just a reassurance that this is what I wanted to do, more than anything. Even in the sleeplessness of trying to work through a problem, and the agony of having to bend your mind backwards to approach a problem differently, I’ve loved arriving each day and getting the opportunity to keep trying to build something. What I’ve learned is that we keep approaching problems not necessarily because we want to see them go away, forever, but because we want to see it work. We want to build things because they solve real problems.
I wanted to take this on, because I had spent my nights coding. I loved it. I loved that everything felt like a puzzle, and even though some puzzles took me to some very dark places (I kid), I wanted to see them through. We keep talking about the ‘click,’ or the moment when everything things to snap into place. All we needed was the right key to turn the lock.
Jerome Bruner introduced scaffolding theory based off of psychologist Lev Vygotsky’s research of how we learn. I think about this when I’m trying to learn something new, and how it feels when different concepts start to build on top of each other. There’s a dialogical cycle alongside this, as you have to understand one thing to get to the next, otherwise the structure falls down. When I can’t seem to get to the next step, it’s understandable to feel lost or frustrated, like we’re left holding our coat and there’s no hook to put it on. Either keep reaching to find the hook (what is logical to us to make the connection), or the whole thing finds itself crumpled on the floor in a mess.
It’s easy to panic if you feel like you’ll never find the hook. If this concept doesn’t make sense, will it not make sense… forever? You have to learn to embrace those momentary feelings of discomfort, and ultimately, that’s what the hardest thing is. The instructors have told us about how important it is to take breaks, and they’re right. When you get bogged down into a problem, your body can freeze and you keep grasping for the last thing you remember rather than looking to where you want to go next. Sometimes the hook you’ve been looking for might be on a different wall entirely, or not look like any hook you’ve seen before, but it will be just what you need to hang your coat.
