Sunny Days Wouldn’t Be Special If It Wasn’t For Rain

Adam Joseph Rizzo
Jul 10, 2017 · 5 min read
Side Note: I work all alone.

Hours. Days. Weeks! I was stuck on one project for all this time. I never contemplated giving up — because that’s not what I’m about on this journey — but there were days I got up and walked away from my work in fury needing a break. An hour here, two hours here, a four-hour marathon session here and zero progress was made. What the hell was I going to do?!?

After multiple sessions of getting absolutely nothing accomplished, I felt like a complete idiot. I know I’m not dumb, stupid or incompetent, but I was getting down on myself, my skills and my journey to becoming a junior developer. I know learning new skills and literally a new language is not supposed to be easy, but this was bordering on ridiculous and ludicrous.


The project that was the bane of my existence for nearly 16 hours of work!

On freeCodeCamp, I’m still on a section of work that requires me to create four different websites. The third project instructed me to build a Wikipedia viewer. To put it as simply as possible, it was a website that would conduct a Wikipedia search based on the search query a user enters and return the top-10 articles related to that query. Seems simple, right? Let me be the first to tell you that it wasn’t.

As I said in my last article — My Programming Forecast: Partly Sunny — working with APIs is not something I am used to and I think it is one of the few things that freeCodeCamp did poorly when it came to educating new users. I think the problem/difficulty with teaching someone how to use an API is that every source that provides one is used completely differently. I’ll let fCC off the hook…for now!

The Wikipedia API documentation is…to be nice difficult to read and understand. After reading around, I’m not the only one who feels this way either. Regardless of what I did, all of the searching on the internet (minus message boards/forums), reading through Wikipedia’s API documentation multiple times, using their API Sandbox to play around with API calls, I couldn’t get it to do anything that I had wanted. If I thought I was frustrated on my last project, this one took me to a whole new level.

Then I read the instructions and there was always a link that says “Remember to use Read-Search-Ask if you get stuck.” I had constantly read and searched, but I never asked for help. One click and I was sent to freeCodeCamp’s version of Stack Overflow where people can pose problems they are having and our fellow nerds come flocking to help, offering their solution to the problem.

What’s best about these forums is that they are specifically dedicated to us campers who have most certainly experienced the same problems that I was facing. I figured I would go in, create a post and then wait for replies. I actually never got that far. A quick search, I found someone having the same exact problem as I did and there were plenty of people offering hints. Nobody is in the business of giving away answers or source code (that’s not the point of these classes) but more or less pushing you in the right direction to help find your way.

After reading those posts, I spent an hour and 45 minutes this morning and then another hour and eight minutes (yes, I have a spreadsheet where I essentially punch in and punch out every time I work) and have since completed the project! What a relief!


50 Cent: the songbird of our generation…

To quote a world-renowned poet and all-around wordsmith:

Sunny days wouldn’t be special, if it wasn’t for rain. Joy wouldn’t feel so good, it if wasn’t for pain. — Curtis “50 Cent” Jackson

Ain’t that the truth Fitty!!! While I was working this morning, my fiance was in the backyard and heard me yelp/scream and came running in. She thought that there was a problem or something had happened. Nope, it wasn’t a problem but a solution I had found for my project. She’s not used to my mini celebrations of my programming successes...yet!

The good times that we experience are always brighter because we know what it’s like to fail or not succeed time and time again. I’ve always said that I hate losing more than I enjoy winning when it came to sports and that mentality still carries over to my programming life. The struggles are so bad at times that you will ALWAYS remember those much more than the simple successes you find.


If I have learned something throughout the process of this one project it is to not be afraid to ask for help. Nobody has made it to the top without some help from others and it won’t be any different for me.

Just last night I had a friend who is a programmer himself sit down with me for two hours to try to help me out. Why I waited two weeks to do that, who knows. I can utilize the forums on freeCodeCamp to see what other campers have found to be helpful. I’ve also toyed with the idea of joining scheduled meetups for other campers in the Boston area. I haven’t worked up the courage to head there on my own just yet, but I can see that happening in the very near future.

Striven Life

We are a group of individuals trying to improve our lives and are focused on helping you do the same.

Adam Joseph Rizzo

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Striven Life

We are a group of individuals trying to improve our lives and are focused on helping you do the same.

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