I’d like to start with my synopsis on The First Mile. What began as a very daunting workload of lessons and labs, became an incredibly informative and interactive learning experience for me and I’m sure many of the other people in my cohort. I initially was worried I wouldn’t be able to complete everything on time, or I would get stuck and be unable to catch back up to the material we were discussing in the live lectures and study groups, but sure enough I made it through. To me, the First Mile represented a major obstacle I needed to hurdle in order to prove to myself I could succeed in this journey to becoming a competent coder and software engineer. It was like completing the first section of an elaborate puzzle. You see there is a much longer way to go ahead of you, but you’re proud that you were able to finish the first piece. I learned so much in terms of syntax, variables, objects, methods, and it really just gave me such a better understanding of what code does in general.
Moving on to completing my first project week… oh boy was it difficult. I’m not going to lie, I really felt so lost so many times. I spent numerous hours over multiple days not even being able to make progress on my project, but just getting a better understanding of what to do and how the different parts of it worked. It took me at least 3 days to truly understand how to consume the API I wanted to use. I had a morning midweek where I was so stressed that I canceled my meeting with my educational coach and then I needed to call out of work that night because I was feeling so overwhelmed and hopeless. This program really beat me down this week. All of that being said, I learned the most I have so far in terms of actively applying the things I’ve learned over the past month. One of the things I loved about the project was that I was able to create something that I also had interest in. I’ve been a huge fan of Pokemon since I was about 4 years old, so I decided to build a CLI where my application acts as a Pokedex for the Kanto region Pokemon. This was really exciting to me because before I even started I had grand visions for my end product. Unfortunately, I wasn’t exactly able to do everything I wanted to do. My CLI runs and gets the job done of prompting the user to open the Pokedex and listing each of the Pokemon in order with their names and url’s to extra information. I wanted to go steps further and access that extra information in my application as well, but I just couldn’t figure it out in time. I’m hoping to work on it some more throughout the rest of the program, but I’m content with having a solid base for now.
Although this program has been kicking my butt, being someone who is still pretty much completely brand new to the tech world and coding, I am really proud of myself for accomplishing what I have so far. When I was in college my fraternity had a saying that really resonates with me.
χαλεπὰ τὰ καλά (Khalepà tà kalá),
This means, “Naught without labor, everything worthwhile is difficult to achieve.”
I believe in that mantra so much because as difficult as this program has been and will continue to be, I know that the reward will be so worthwhile.