DEV Community: Sonja Parsell

Running the Flatiron Marathon

Sonja Parsell — Mon, 08 Nov 2021 17:47:54 +0000

A Marathon Finisher

I finished my last Flatiron project the weekend of the NYC Marathon, which I ran in 2004, and it made me think of how similar the two events have been for me.

I had entered the marathon lottery with a handful of colleagues, however I was the only one who won a place. I had already decided that if I got it, I would do it, no backing down. So there I was, training on my own, instead of with half a dozen girls. I was terrified of not finishing and I had no idea what to expect from myself so I put in the work: a strict training regime, a ridiculously strict diet and a very strict social calendar. Nothing was going to keep me from earning that medal.

Flash forward to the finish line, and it was hands down one of the best days of my life (even to this day - after having married the man of my dreams and having had two children - it still easily remains in the top five).

To have accomplished something I had originally thought was impossible for me, felt extraordinary to say the least. It was an experience that opened my eyes about myself. I really could do ANYTHING I set my mind to and I had just proven it to myself.

The Same, but Different

Starting Flatiron was a big thing for me and my family. I had spent years, on and off, trying a self-study route that left me really frustrated. I knew attending Flatiron was the right fit for me, but it was challenging to convince my husband that I needed to enroll. That is, until I linked the feeling I had about coding to finishing a marathon. I needed to do this for myself. He had completed a few marathons, so that analogy seemed to work. I was in!

On March 3, 2020, the same rigorous "marathon training regime" came back with a vengeance. I woke at 5:00 AM every day to get in some coding before the house woke up; I was on track to finish in 11 months. Two weeks later, the world shut down and the pandemic changed my learning time and place, but it did not change my determination to finish and get the medal, or in this case, the sweatshirt! (OMG...I hope they still reward you with a Flatiron sweatshirt! I may be seriously crushed if they don't!).

With the pandemic came homeschooling (giving up my computer and workspace during school hours), so much housework (and why is everyone expecting to eat three meals a day!??) and so much stress about the state of the world. I definitely didn't finish in 11 months but I did finish and I'm so proud of having stuck with it

Also, a Flatiron Finisher

For my final project in React and Redux, I decided to re-make my Sinatra project. This idea was very near and dear to me, as it solved a problem I had. These types of projects keep me interested and motivated. (I would highly recommend to anyone just starting out at Flatiron - or any bootcamp - to focus on finding a problem to solve that you are very familiar with.)

Because of my time constraints and needing to finish before my program ended, I really pared down the project to the minimal requirements. There are several features I plan to work on after I graduate (including authentication and hosting) which will keep me learning and developing long into my job search. (Which hopefully won't be TOO long!)

React is a fantastic framework. Once I grasped the initial concepts, like learning anything new, it was just a matter of time before I enjoyed an initial level of fluency, and that rush that comes with seeing the basic framework of your idea coming to life.

The Next Marathon: A Job Search

The next milestone, naturally, is to put these newly minted coding skills to work. I've got a lot of work experience, but also a lot of imposter syndrome when it comes to finding a software engineering role. The only way I know how to approach a successful outcome is to break it down, be resilient, show up every day and give myself the time I need.

After that, maybe I need to train for another marathon...NYC 2024?

My JavaScript Project for Flatiron School

Sonja Parsell — Thu, 02 Sep 2021 14:29:30 +0000

I've been studying JavaScript for a looooong time. It started with FCC in 2016. Event listeners and DOM manipulation didn't make a whole lot of sense; I had a hard time connecting the dots. I had a lot of warning that this might be the case so I'm happy that I didn't give up or give in the temptation to believe I just wasn't cut out for software engineering.

This program has taken me a lot longer to finish that I had originally planned for. I'm sure there are many who have had the same experience due to Covid, and, well, just life. I know I would have thrived in a part-time or full-time cohort but I knew it just wasn't an option. We all have to work with what we have. If it takes four times longer, then it will take four times longer and it will be ok.

As with all my projects thus far, they seem to take me awhile. I'm sure there are ways I could have moved faster but I'm still showing up every day and realizing more and more, life will ALWAYS get in the way. You just have to keep moving ahead.

While I'm preparing for my assessment, I've taken some time to reflect on this project. There were some challenges, of course and also some things that I am learning over time in this program, that move me forward and confirm I'm in the right place.

Challenging things:

JavaScript's Office Hours were not friendly to my schedule.

That isn't Flatiron's fault. I tend to be the odd ball self-paced student and prefer study groups before my kids get home from school (3:00 PM EST). All the sessions for JavaScript were in the late afternoon and early evening. I really pushed myself to re-arrange my day (and my family's schedule) to be able to make the study groups. No one was happy about it but I think it was a good lesson for all of us.
I worked on my project over the summer holiday.

My kids were home from school and had a different activity schedule every week; balancing my needs with theirs was a huge obstacle (with no back-up childcare) and slowed me down considerably. Can I wait while you participate or do I need to drive home and back? Will there be WiFi? What if it rains? Can we carpool? Agh....!!!!
A (relatively) long period of time lapsed from when I started to when I finished.

This meant I had to review many concepts A LOT and felt at times that I was going nowhere, or worse, backwards. (However, see silver lining below.)

Good things:

I'm solving my own problem with my project.
- My projects tend to be very specific to my needs, which has served me well. I know there are more standard projects to build (i.e., make an instagram clone) and by not sticking to that, I tend to struggle more, but I know I stay interested longer. I'm more curious and passionate when I work on something that I want to use and is totally relevant to me or my family.
I'm using a lot of different resources.

This has the benefit of really solidifying the context or syntax in the language. While I've definitely benefitted from Flatiron's curriculum, I think it's good to get instruction from different voices and different mediums as well: videos, tutorials, build-a-longs, etc. I use them all.
I learned a lot over the duration of building my project.

Here's the silver lining from above. By having to repeat a lesson or a tutorial, I added layer upon layer of understanding. By reviewing my code so much, a mental model of JavaScript is finally taking shape and I like it! In reviewing material, I found that the second (or third!) time around I had an actual instinct as to what to do. I was faster and faster each time.
Refactoring does not terrify me anymore. Mostly.

That instinct I mentioned in #3 comes in handy here. I feel more and more fluent and confident in making changes and trying things out without the paralysis of thinking the whole thing will fall over. I'm better at commenting code out that works and trying my ideas. I'm also much better at debugging in JavaScript, something I really struggled with when I first started.

I know I have yet to pass my assessment, but I also know that is just a matter of time.

A Sinatra Project

Sonja Parsell — Tue, 27 Oct 2020 14:12:05 +0000

Below are a few ramblings from my Sinatra project build. It was such a great learning experience and I can't wait to show it to my friends. Read on...

Solve your own problem

As a software engineering student, we have the task of choosing what we make for our projects, with very few restrictions, as long as the requirements are met. I've definitely been frustrated with this job, as it can be daunting to find the Goldilocks ("just right") project. Not too ambitious, not ambitious enough, not too boring, not too complicated...you know what I mean. You've been there.

On the other hand, it's quite a little luxury.

I feel like I hit the jackpot when my project idea came from something I needed. It solved a very real problem for me and fit perfectly into the requirements. As we learned about classes and objects and how to make them work together (magic!) throughout the curriculum, I started to think about things in my life that way. The idea wasn't far behind.

When my daughter was in 3rd grade, she was convinced that every girl in her class had a phone. They would talk about chats they had late in the night and all the virtual socializing they were doing outside of school. Naturally, my daughter felt left out (as her father and I have decided to 'wait until 8th' grade for a phone for her - at the EARLIEST). Now, I knew these girls didn't have the tech or access to it the way they described since their mother's are some of my closest friends, but my daughter wouldn't believe me.

So I created ClassTech. It's an app that would be used by each parent in a child's class, to show others in the grade what tech their child has and uses. A golden source, if you will. Check it out here. (Someday, I would love to actually release it!)

The fact that this app is something I needed made me all the more passionate to build it. And through this success, I have more ideas for my next three projects brewing away, ready to take off once I hit Rails, JS and React. My whiteboard is already a mess...

Build as you go

Being a self-paced student, and having my shiny new software engineering study schedule completely thrown out the window by the coronavirus craziness only two weeks after I started, I decided on a parallel approach to learning Sinatra while building at the same time. Having my project idea before I started gave me a very real way to think about the new concepts I was learning. I could try things out with my own models and it really helped to solidify what I needed to build.

Sure, I ended up starting over a few times but that in itself was great practice. A lot of what we are learning isn't complicated, it's just unfamiliar. (A fellow student wrote that, and I'm sorry I can't remember which blog it was so I can't give proper credit.) Repetition makes the unfamiliar familiar. And that gives us confidence that we have almost nailed it.

Don't be afraid of challenges

About a week before I was about to declare my project finished, I realized I had set up an association wrong. (Yes, even with all that practice!) My app wouldn't do the ONE thing I really wanted it to do! I needed a join table to represent the fact that Children have many Devices and Devices have many Children. (I had set it up as a belongs_to association so you couldn't see how many kids had an iPad or a Chromebook - there was only one of each!)

I'm sure I had been coached to do it correctly (with a join table), but at the time I was still crawling and was likely focused on other areas, so missed the great advice. It really wasn't the end of the world. I laughed at myself and honestly, felt a little proud that I figured out what was wrong on my own. You have to celebrate the small stuff, right? (More on that below.)

Over the weekend, I took notes on all the steps to change my association and by Monday afternoon, it was done. And it worked.

Use the resources

Just because we don't have the ability to use AAQ for our projects, doesn't mean we are on our own.

Study groups (a million thanks to Dustin and Dwayne!): I mean, they are awesome.
Flatiron videos of Sinatra builds:
- I loved Ayana's complete build series, starting with this one, and
- Jenn's route protection video was also extremely helpful.
  
  Me: Watch, pause the video, think it through, test it out in my code, rewind, watch again. Repeat.
Sinatra Slack channel: find others in the same place as you, a second pair of eyes to review your code, or get someone to help you debug.

There's just no reason to go through it alone. It can be frustrating, demoralizing and make you think all kinds of crazy thoughts about not having learned anything. That's not what we are here for and quite simply, it's just not true.

Celebrate

I am ridiculously proud of how my project turned out. I learned so much, held myself to my own schedule, stretched myself to do more, and really strengthened my ties to the learning community.

My daughter LOVED the app when I showed her and I'm super excited to show my friends - my biggest fans in all of this. (Because, we all have kids who want phones and think they are the only ones without!)

Now, on to Rails...

Nevertheless, Sonja somehow managed to keep showing up

Sonja Parsell — Mon, 09 Mar 2020 22:32:43 +0000

I somehow managed to avoid a tech career for 25 years. It wasn’t “cool”, I had my sights on other paths, and I felt invisible to my CS instructor (although I loved the class) in college. I wasn’t convinced...

I somehow managed to find myself a close ally with all the IT departments of all the banks in which I worked. “Can you test this?”, “Will this work the way you need it to?”, “Have I thought of all the scenarios for these bonds?”. I wasn’t moved...

I somehow managed to find errors in hard coded processes that, once reversed, recovered $250k in revenue. I didn’t make the connection...

I somehow managed to make a lateral move into technology to manage a service delivery team for a new sub-ledger project after maternity leave. It was amazing...and would have been so much better if I could just dig into the code myself, if I knew how it all worked, if I could help with the testing. But time for another baby...

I somehow managed to come across Codcademy and the future was laid out, shining in front of me! But we moved. Across the ocean. And all the chaos of transplanting with a four year old and one and a half year old were mine to manage. I couldn’t find the time...

I somehow managed to finally (!) dedicate some quality time to learning: Udemy, Skillcrush and Free Code Camp are wonderful resources. I was on my way to a php conference after arranging child care for three days. But I had a brain hemorrhage...

I somehow managed to recover 100% and again, found the beacon of a new career, where I can make a difference, work for what I am passionate about, and be a role model for my kids. I graduated from a coding bootcamp!

This time, I will somehow manage - as I always do - to become a software engineer. I'm looking for my first dev job!