It has been such a busy time; are Bostonians always so busy and so on it? It's almost a year since I've moved to Boston, which feels crazy because I feel like I've barely touched my toes into the dev world and having a technical job, but at the same time, realising that a year ago I could barely navigate a terminal, and now it feels easier to me than a GUI? I'm shocked to be honest.
I was poking around my GitHub and portfolio today cleaning up some things and I decided to do another JavaScript challenge - the last one I did was mid September as per DevDojo. It's so weird but now I find it a bit confusing to write JavaScript! I missed my lets and totally wrote for i in range len(arr) until I realized, wait a minute, there's way more syntax here than that.
Crazy. I don't even usually write Python code - I mean we use a limited version of Python at work and I've been writing lots of that lately - and I'm constantly either reading that version of Python or running data scripts to push that Python. HOWEVER, somehow it has completely creeped up on me and become my natural coding configuration in my head!
That was fast.
I was so happy to be able to solve the challenge without too much trouble, given that I'm not usually solving coding challenges as much as running imports or writing the versioned little full stack Python for my company's clients.
I also opened up Python Crash Course and haven't worked through any problems but just reviewing the basics. It's cooler when we are forced to do stuff for work, it definitely makes me more keen on getting something figured out.
I learned so much in the past 3 months at work though - I seriously can't believe it. I feel now I understand way more why I should try to findHighestPrice() (the challenge I did today) or how to findHighestPriced() - gotta admit in my head I was solving it in the versioned Python. REPETITION MAKES PERFECT! I'm honestly so surprised.
Apart from that I'm a bit sad that my life has gotten so busy I hardly have any time to myself and to work on my coding skills. When I'm not at work I have so much house admin to do and/or I want to be playing badminton and/or there are lovely people to meet (Boston must be the best city for meeting friends).
I just hope that with my job going better, I will be able to devote some more time to get good at both Python and JS. Python because my work is mainly Python and I have large books for it, and JS because that's the one I "grew up with"!!!
Also, Tuesday and Wednesday of this week, I was part of our company's Hackathon! I didn't get to actually code but I pair-programmed with one of our most senior devs to create a Google Docs style collaboration on our platform. It was built on Firebase which was cool that I got to learn a new thing. I spent so long trying to set up the dev environment locally and ended up giving up - suspicion that it's the M2 Apple chip on my work computer, but you never know. I could also just try it again another day but it took a lot of time. The backend docker containers kept crashing and I don't know why.
In any case, good times, grateful that I can still solve these challenges with zero practice - must be helpful to be coding 40% of the time at work and struggling through everything...eventually it just starts working and starts making sense and whatever you reach into helps...pretty mindblown right now where I was a year ago, crying about breaking up while figuring out what bootcamp to join. I'll be honest I'm still crying sometimes, but with everything I've done since then, things have gotten a lot better in life in general, thinking there's a lot to go still but there's a lot I can do in one year.
Catt xx