Week Five: Day Three
How quickly the tide can turn.
I was having the shittiest day today. It was our second day with JavaScript, a language that initially appealed to me because of its far more straightforward and strict nature than Ruby. After every line, you have to put a semicolon (except when you don't; and even if you don't, it doesn't matter most of the time), which quickly became the one constant in my life. I started on the two-pronged problem set yesterday, and while I knew I was making errors in every exercise, I plowed on ahead and was feeling pretty good about myself.
That is, until, I got stuck on objects, arrays and loops. Two of my classmates told me what I already knew all along but didn't know how to change — that I was way overthinking the problems — and it got me into a bit of a funk. Couple that with the last several nights of not enough sleep, and I was beyond frustrated when sitting with one of the TAs, feeling stupider than a rock in trying to solve a really basic problem.
I knew when signing up for this that there was a lot of risk, intensity, difficulty and hard work involved, and I vowed to make failure a non-option and do whatever it took to succeed. But sitting on the couch this afternoon, tired, hungry and frustrated, I sank into a funk and questioned why I had ever started this. Writing isn't easy, but it was something that came naturally to me and something I achieved a decent level of quality at fairly quickly and easily. Coding is, hands down, the most difficult thing I've ever attempted intellectually. Each day I've felt stupid more times than I could count; each day I discovered new gaps in my lack of knowledge; and each day I realized just how much of a small fish in a huge pond I was. And because I couldn't quit, there seemed to be no way out for me.
But around 6, a bunch of us left the lab to head to Steamwhistle for the Tech Vibes TechFest, a big conference-like event where vendors and job seekers could mingle. Networking and glad-handing has never come easily to me, so trying to put on a happy face when I was already feeling pretty low just wasn't something I felt like doing. Nonetheless, there was no quit option so I tried to limit the chainsmoking and force a smile on my face.
I'm glad I did because when I got in, I was surprised at how easy it was to talk to the vendors. But the best part came when I wandered in through the other end after a smoke, and came upon a whiteboard with this on it:
| 11 x 11 = 4 | 22 x 22 = 16 |
| 33 x 33 = 18 | 44 x 44 = ? |
After puzzling over it for a good five minutes, I thought "64" might be the answer". It was not. A guy came up to my left and also thought it was 64, so after chatting to him and telling him I'd come up to the same conclusion, we put our minds together. We came up with all sorts of crazy theories — the kind that would make perfect sense if you'd just smoked a joint — and quickly discarded each one. But after thinking and thinking, we hit on it: modulo! Triple bar!
Turns out our answer was right, and not only was it right, but we were the first ones to solve it and that earned us a conversation with the company's CTO and a prospective interview.
How quickly the tide can turn.
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