TIFU(Today I Fuc*ed Up) A Guide from a Beginner to a Beginner
Tags: beginners, rookie, junior
Published: 2018-05-21 19:28:35

---
title: TIFU(Today I Fuc*ed Up) A Guide from a Beginner to a Beginner
published: true
description: 
tags: beginner, rookie, junior
---

##TIFU

The title of this post came to me in something pretty unrelated to Developing, that is another post but rewarding a trading card game called Magic: The Gathering. I highly recommend it, even if you don't know anything about the game.
https://theepicstorm.com/today-i-fucked-up/

Being a Junior in the world of software can be a bit tricky, at first you feel that is A LOT to learn, like you can't do all the things you are asked, you start reading, again and again, the simple definition of an object, variable, or even a boolean.
Today I want to tell my personal experience, and I really hope this helps other people that are starting to learn how this beautiful thing that is programming works.

##Begging

You will see that most programmers started programming at a very young age, mostly cause they were curious and wanted to make a website, some hack or certain software. 
My personal experience was *way* different. After high school, I study one year of Law, after that two years of Physics, and after some self-realizing trips, I came to the realization that I wanted to study something interesting that I could do every day but still manage to see my friends and follow my own passions.
After a lot of talk with friends, a lot of whom are developers, programming seem like the right call.
After a year and a half in the career, I had a basic understanding of Javascript, HTML, CSS, and PHP.

##The Real Learning
A friend of mine told me about this 'Boot camps' that a few companies were doing at my city, I signed up for two of them with a friend, I wasn't working at the moment so how hard could it be? (Spoiler alert, bad idea) 
I ended up sleeping 5 hours a day between college and the two boot camps, I had not one moment of peace, learning how to really develop in Angular, HTML, CSS, Sass, LESS, Javascript and more. I felt utterly stupid because I thought I was being left behind on the knowledge, and that everyone was ahead of me. After some weeks we send our final projects, after all that effort I wasn't doing that bad, cause I got job offers from both places. In the end, I went to work at another company with a friend of mine.

##Work as a Junior

The first few weeks were HELL, the project I was working started from scratch in AngularJS. And I felt confused with the amount of component, directives, services and more. It was all very different from what I was working with. I remember the first week I tried to assign a variable to and if statement, I was a disaster. Thankfully I had some pretty good seniors by my side, that help me push through all of it. Still I felt that I was making mistakes everyday, I fuc*ed up everything I touched and nothing was really okay, I started feeling like a failure and even thought of changing career, I felt like a burden to my senior friend, and it was honestly a horrible moment that it was all in my head.

##The Epiphany

There was a moment, I don't know if it was two or three months after I started working that all started to make sense, it was like needing glasses for a long time and finally having them, every line of code made sense, I started to not only like what I do but LOVE it. When I finished 20 lines of code in a row without blinking I felt freaking amazing, the ecstasy of the moment was incomparable. I started not only doing my job but getting home from work and kept programming in personal and freelancer jobs, reading book and article after another about new languages, frameworks and more. I was in the zone, I'm still on it, and I don't want to ever be outside of it.

##Conclusion

This is something you already know, but I'm gonna tell you again. Life ain't easy, it never is, developing requires a lot of effort, but once you get to the point of adrenaline it gives you, there is no return, push through every debugging, hard function and component you gotta create, do not feel bad cause you don't understand it at first. Read the documentation, ask a friend, post on a forum, try to learn more and more every minute. I know is hard, but once you take a look back and see how far you have you traveled you feel great, but remember to keep looking forward, because when you realize how much travel you have ahead of you, how much you still have to learn, there is no better feeling.