Day 2 Start!
Published: 2021-10-26 16:24:52

Hey everybody! My name is Logan McLaughlin and today I start Day 2 of my journey down the road of my Software Engineering education! If you unclear about where my journey began, please visit the navigation links below, which I will begin to add at the end of every post for the sake of user convenience, to both take you to the very first post in this series as well as Previous and Next links!

(As a special addendum to this post, I want to mention that I will edit previous posts to apply a lot of optimizations retroactively. Because I like good structure in projects like this. Thank you for your patience!)

Now, onto the content!

[Small Talk](## Small Talk)
[Thoughts About Previous Lesson](## Thoughts About Yesterday’s Lesson)
[Thoughts About Today’s Lesson](## Thoughts About Today’s Lesson)
[Final Thoughts](## Final Thoughts)
[Navigation](###### Navigation)

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## Small Talk

So I want to start by saying that, with these sections moving forward, some of the subjects may get a bit... heavy. In future, if you wish to stick strictly with my educational process, please head to my Thoughts About Yesterday's Lesson. Thanks!

So I live in a house that's not awfully conducive to learning or, well, much of anything constructive due to the people I share this house with. I am actively working to leave this environment, but I do understand that I am kind of stuck here until I do. And I wanted to do something to further my own education, if only to occupy my time until I am capable of devoting more time to myself, my own wellbeing, and of course, to my education.

I have recently ordered a Laptop to use in places where traveling with my massive setup, helmed by my gaming rig I've lovingly dubbed "Bertha Mk. II", as the second iteration that I built last Spring after my previous gaming rig, "Bertha Mk. I" started to become severely obsolete as she was built all the way back in 2014. Bertha Mk. II is not perfect by any stretch, but she gets me by just fine, though in the distant but not too distant future, she is gonna need some upgrades to her GPU, and in building her the CPU was slightly damaged due to my own foolishness, but was somehow still able to work, so I need to replace her CPU as well.

Anyway, my Laptop is meant to be for travel or during times where having access to Bertha is not feasible. And I think I picked a good choice for the money I was willing to spend on it! It also has a touch screen with a stylus, so I am very lowkey hoping (but certainly not banking on) being able to use it to practice a bit of art if I ever want to pursue that.

Had a pretty awful night's sleep the past week and Monday saw me reach my limits with that (I sleep on a couch in my mother's living room while I apartment hunt. I've been here for almost two full years now. The housing market is atrocious, even in a smaller city like mine.) But I was able to get some much needed rest last night, so I wanted to tackle stuff today too!

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## Thoughts About Yesterday’s Lesson

Going back to my original notes, everything makes sense to me, pretty much. We learned what Programming is on a fundamental level, which is how humans communicate with computers and other machines. Programming is us, the humans, hash out a list of instructions we want to tell the machine in our own native language. Then, as coders, we take those instructions and translate them into a language the machine can understand. Finally, we submit these instructions for the machine to perform. We explored, briefly, the differences between the Human mind and a Machine mind, separated the definitions of Programming and Coding, talked about what it is a Software Engineer actually does, which is essentially using their collective knowledge to innovate on design and develop new software systems. Finally, we learned the difference between Front-End Engineering (which focuses on the client side of things as far as form and function, making things easy for the user to understand) and Back-End Engineering (which focuses on the server side of things as far as form and function, optimizing database storage for the system.)

All in all, a very straightforward explanation of things, as far as I am concerned, and I am very excited to be on this particular path as someone who loves solving puzzles and coming up with solutions!

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## Thoughts About Today’s Lesson

Taking a peek at the title, Today's Lesson is called "Introduction: Javascript Syntax, Part I" and contains 9 total sections. As this will be my first formal step into the coding, I am not entirely sure what to expect before I begin. Will I be able to comfortably complete the entire unit? Or will I need to stop partway through and pick it back up again tomorrow? Only time will tell, but I'm confident! With how things are broken up, if I feel ready to stop by the end of the fourth section, I'll break for the day and talk about my thoughts on "Introduction: Javascript Syntax, Part I, part 1" or some silly nonsense title like that. If I feel good enough to run through the entire unit, I'll report on the entire Lesson overall. Either way, today proves to be an exciting and intensive session!

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## Final Thoughts

Sunday's learnings were remarkably simple and merely went into the basics of the basics of the lesson plan and its purpose. A proper introduction, plainly. This one is shaping up to look like we'll get started into the nitty-gritty of Javascript! So before I jump into that, I do want to do what I said I was going to do at the top of this post and retroactively edit my others to form some kind of style cohesion.

With that said, thank you very much and I’ll get my next post in when I’m done with learning for today so I can recap! I’ll see you then! Take care!

###### Navigation
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