{Embrace} the Suck
Don’t worry this will not be a military jargon saturated tangent. What this will be is insight into how your skills gained while serving will help you every minute of your development journey.
Let’s take a look at two learning situations quick:
- You follow along a JavaScript Tutorial and make little to no mistakes and at the end of let’s say 5 hours you have yourself a todo list (95% of all tuts out there).
- You do the same style tutorial and and get stomped at least 3 times as to why your code isn’t working like on the video. You check every semi-colon, read the rants on Stackoverflow and take 3 days to fight your way through the code and get it to work, finally.
So in the end, one of these situations seems more beneficial and setting you up to be an amazing developer?Which one do you feel is more beneficial?
The winner behind door number 1 is… actually number 2 , see what I did there? You may see what I am getting at, when you struggle, when you go down the endless rabbit holes, when you look at your code 50+ times for any syntax errors you are drilling this stuff in your head! On the other hand the false sense of accomplishment you feel from doing something too easy for your level will not land you that job and big 💰.
This may be obvious to you but if not don’t worry. Traditional education shuns mistakes, thinks they are evil and you get to hear it from multiple people when you make them. I am not bitter in anyway, in fact I have multiple degrees in business and when I started to learn code I was hard on myself for any mistakes.
“If you’re struggling and getting frustrated… good job you’re learning!”
Or more eloquently put…
“If you’re having no problems I feel bad for you son. I have 99 problems and a hackathon I just won!”
Jokes aside though I have been tutoring and instructing new students for over 1,000 hours and I know that learning expedites when you struggle. Why am I even telling you this? If you served you know this too well. Bootcamp is all about struggle and iteration of tasks until the mental patterns are formed and the muscle memory kicks in.
The point that I am making, no, what I am telling you is, you already have the skills and critical thinking necessary to not only learn programming but to learn and be a force in any aspect from a top notch employee, to solving a world problem with software, or anything else you see yourself pursuing.
One of the greatest assets we all have who served is the mental and physical fortitude to crush critical thinking in pressure situations and handle ourselves well in these situations.
The intent of this article isn’t to stroke your ego or make you feel like you’ll easily become a developer because of the for-mentioned traits, it is to let you know you have a marathon ahead of you and most people are scared of even thinking about the journey to get there, but not us, we look forward to the journey and having a network like VetsWhoCode guide and mentor you along the way makes it even better.
