Week Five: Day Two
I'm writing this with hours to go before the official midway point of the course. It's a point I wasn't crazy to reach because for the first half, I could excuse my feeling lost with the novelty of the information; once I hit the second half, I feel more (self-imposed?) pressure on myself to grasp more material, more quickly. But I chanced upon this really cool technique that suddenly made the lectures not feel so Greek to me — skimming over the material the night before! Huzzah! We delved into JavaScript yesterday and I'd heard nothing but horror stories about it, so I tried to take as much of the sting out of it in advance as possible.
So far, out of everyone I've talked to who's had an opinion on how I should be spending my out-of-class time, not one has said I need to hit the figurative books a lot harder. If anything, they're worried I'm spending too much time on the material and not taking enough of a break for myself. "You might be a little paranoid," said one classmate, when I explained that if I don't bust my ass hard, there'll be 10 people behind me who will and I can't let that be the difference between a hire or not. "Are you going out with people instead of just staying in all the time?" said my mom. She's mildly concerned I'm not developing enough of a social life and wants to see me balance computers with real-life faces. "You know, it's perfectly alright to not code for hours and hours when you get home and watch a bit of TV instead" — this, or some variation on this, is what everyone else says.
But I have quite an addictive personality and once I latch onto something that interests me in the least, I sponge it up until I've gotten every last ounce, drachm and grain from it. And so far, coding is far more than just slightly interesting. It's like this never-ending series of puzzles that can be as easy or difficult as you want, and like art or music, there are always several beautiful ways of making it happen. Although it looks like colourful mumbo-jumbo on the screen, there's an elegance to really good code, like in this one lightning talk I heard last night.
Speaking of the lightning talk, it was hosted where I'm studying and I got to talking to two students from the cohort before mine. One of them said something that made my stomach drop faster than a lead balloon: "Out of our cohort, only one person got a job."
Yikes.
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