Flatiron School, Phase 1
Published: 2024-01-08 02:29:42

Recently I took on what I would soon find to be the most informative and eye opening 3 weeks that I’ve had in a very long time.

I was a personal trainer for a year before I decided to start Flatiron. I knew software development was where I wanted to lean towards  in terms of my career, but it wasn’t until recently I decided to go ahead and commit to Flatiron. I can safely say that it was the correct decision through and through.

Of course these last few weeks were jam packed with technical information. Things seemed easy, but pointless the first week as we learned about JavaScript variables, functions, arrays, objects, and scope. Learning about callback functions on its own felt meaningless, but then having learned event listeners made things make more sense. As we learned more, the fundamental topics became so minuscule, but absolutely crucial in the later topics. One day I’m learning what a function is and how to make one and just a few days later making a function is almost second nature and just a small step in something more grand. Things really started to make sense on the second week when we started DOM manipulation. Now everything we learned was being put into practical use. Seeing that document open up for the first time in the browser as if it’s your own little website is surreal. Coming from a field that has nothing to do with software, I was blown away. I learned how fetch data from an API with its URL and display it onto an HTML page, manipulate the HTML so it reflects what you want. More and more the practicality in it all became clear. And then finally, project week. The instructions were to work together with my cohort to create a program for users with some given requirements that needed to be met. From scratch, we created our own HTML, used Javascript to give it some functionality and then CSS to make it look presentable. The feeling was definitely indescribable. Besides the nightmare of learning to work with github I thought the project was very straightforward and enjoyable. Now knowing that I can use a real public API to create a program with meaning really opened the floodgates. All of a sudden I had the tools to start create my own program and ideas started to pour in. Being told that most of my ideas would not only be easier, but can easily be expanded on with React might have been a tad bit disheartening, but a whole lot more compelling. I look forward to the coming weeks and how much more I'll be able to do by the end of them.

Along with the superfluous technical information, Flatiron also taught me some more "normal life lessons" within these last few weeks. I've always heard software engineers say something along the lines of "it's all about practice" or "just put in the time and you'll be fine". Boy could they have been more correct and I definitely experienced that even if it was on a very small scale. Just a few days of practicing coding can be the difference of completely forgetting something or being steps closer to making it second nature. Just a few nights without practice and I would forget some of the earlier topics which in turn would set me back when trying to figure out more advanced problems. But if I was consistent in coding then I wouldn't have to look up simple things which not only caused my workflow to be smoother, but gave me the room to ask "bigger" questions. In turn I was out in a position to find "bigger" answers. Now this is a rabbit hole I can see myself getting lost in.