Coding Bootcamp: Day 6

Week Two: Day Six

I don't know if it's possible, but the pace and intensity seem to accelerate more and more. We learned about servers and how to communicate with them, even though both the instructor and TA said we really wouldn't be using them at all (unless we transitioned into becoming back-end developers, which may be something I might be interested in the future).

We also did two separate sharing circles where we went around and talked about what we wanted to see changed/what we weren't understanding. I felt like I was the only one — and Erik even warned me about that when I first came by to see the place — but in the circle, nearly everyone confessed to feeling like they were just going through the motions without really understanding what they were doing, or why.

That felt a little reassuring, but I still want to feel like I want to understand everything. Part of my nature is that when I learn about one thing, I want to learn everything else that's associated with it, how they all relate to each other, and how it all works in various circumstances. I chatted with one TA, Fabio, for over half an hour today during the practice session and got answers to a lot of questions I was having, and a bit of reassurance that things will be okay. This same TA said last week that coding is like learning to play music. You can:

Either have someone show you every single note and chord in "Stairway to Heaven" and repeat that until you build up a catalogue of 30 songs, or

Learn where every note is on the instrument, how they build up into chords and progressions, read sheet music, and sight read that same catalogue of 30 songs — and more.

Obviously, I want to do the same, never minding that I'm classically trained in music and wholly believe in that approach, because I want to be 100% sure I've mastered all the basics and can mash them together to create shorter, telescoped, elegant code. It's sort of like (dis)proving logic theorems: you have to know what a tautology is before you can solve Gödel's incompleteness theorems. And coding is the same in that there's more than one solution, but plenty of wrong ones. It's like working on a never-ending supply of puzzle problems where it's all too easy to get all Sheldon Cooper-ish (which I've been guilty of more than once — and it's this video that made me Google how to pick locks, too) in the work.

But it's so much fun.