How I learned to stop worrying and love the fu*k-ups

Corey — Mon, 11 Nov 2019 14:33:38 +0000

I stared at the blinking cursor on my screen and thought to myself, this is it. I’m gonna do it. I’m gonna whip this laptop across the room like a goddamn frisbee.

And then I saw it.

The elusive missing semi-colon that had almost been my undoing and the catalyst in my laptop’s brutal demise. It was nowhere close to the error message my Sass Compiler had identified, but it was what broke my code at the eleventh hour. Of course, all of these debugging tools we have at our disposal to help identify errors are nice, but they’re merely a guideline, not miracle workers. It’s like when you’re the designated driver and you’re trying to get an address from a drunk friend. You might reach your destination without incident or you might end up in the middle of nowhere having flashbacks to scenes from The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. So, proceed with caution.

Now, this wasn’t the first time I had been frustrated, it certainly won’t be the last. Since quitting my job and going back to school it has been a fast and furious learning curve. Leaving my comfort zone and embarking on this crazy journey into the world of web development at Juno College meant I’ve had to start doing something I’ve always hated and would typically avoid at all costs... admitting I don’t know everything (and probably never will again) and asking for help when I hit the wall.

For my laptop’s safety and to avoid tearing my own hair out in frustration, I started to force myself to ask for help when I really needed it (i.e. those times my brains were totally scrambled and Google and Stack Overflow failed me). And you know what happened? The world didn’t end, I didn’t die of embarrassment, no one made me feel stupid for asking a question or not knowing something. In fact, most times, people were jumping at the chance to help out the noob.

Are web developers secretly the nicest people on the planet or are they just buttering me up before they ask me to invest in some pyramid scheme? Only time will tell. What I do know is now when I have the chance to help out a fellow aspiring developer, I jump at the chance. Call me crazy, but there may be something to this positive reinforcement stuff.

The hardest part of this journey to date has been accepting that I’m gonna fu*k-up, probably quite often and to varying degrees ranging from mild to catastrophic. But that’s part of the process. My ego still takes a bit of a hit, but I also learn something new every time it happens.

So, I’m off to go fu*k something up today, but I’ll learn something new and be able to tell you how I fixed it later.

I blew up my life

Corey — Tue, 29 Oct 2019 00:29:26 +0000

“I’m an imposter, a goddamn liar!”

At least, that’s what my internal monologue was screaming as I changed the title on my LinkedIn profile to “Front-End Developer”. You see, last month I basically blew up my life and walked away from my job of over 8 years and a career in advertising and marketing I had spent considerably longer building. I know, smart right?

It was absolutely fucking terrifying.

So why had I walked away from my career and sole source of income? Had I won the lottery? Received a surprise inheritance from a long-lost rich relative? Nope. I walked away because the first time I wrote “Hello World!” in my text editor, I was hooked. When I signed up for my first HTML & CSS workshop on a whim, little did I know I would fall down the rabbit hole into the world of web development. But one afternoon workshop lead to an 8-week part-time web development introductory course, which lead to 24-weeks of part-time HTML, CSS and JavaScript courses.

It was safe to say this was now more than a hobby for me.

I was excited to go to class even after working all day, I wanted to work on my projects all the time, I was thinking about my code when I should have been focusing on other things. This was a problem. Why? Because the more exited I got about web development the harder it became to ignore the fact that I was miserable in my job.

Truthfully, I couldn’t recall a time where I had been as passionate about work as I had become about coding. Over my career it had become common place to work in environments where most people were frustrated and burnt out on a daily basis. That’s some pretty depressing shit isn’t it? I’m not gonna lie. It was rough.

However, the more web development courses I took, the more alumni from HackerYou & Juno College I met. Most of them had no previous experience in coding, the only thing most of them had in common was the fact they had taken the Web Development Immersive Bootcamp. From there, they were able to launch a new career, forge a new path. The other weird thing? They were all pretty fucking happy. Ok, well maybe I was the only one who found that weird. They also all universally raved about their experience in the Bootcamp. Now, at this point I had started to suspect this may in fact be some sort of cult. How could so many people have the same positive experience without some sort of brainwashing going on? Despite that, it was the only cult I had ever been interested in joining.

The idea of building a career where I would continuously be learning, growing and challenging myself was now starting to feel more like a possibility than a pipe dream. I decided to take a chance and apply to the Bootcamp. I was accepted to Cohort 24 and am now a Juno College student.

There’s no turning back now. Bring on the Kool-Aid!

DEV Community: Corey

How I learned to stop worrying and love the fu*k-ups

I blew up my life