Week 2, what happened to week 1? I like it when films start in media res. The audience gets drawn in when they're not drip fed the story and have to piece it together along with the protagonist. If I had more cunning I'd pretend that I'd adopted this tactic to draw you in. The truth is that this weekend is the first time I've had enough room in my head to think about writing anything that doesn't begin with def or puts. Week 2 of a 9 week full stack web development bootcamp. Not even one third of the way through and I feel like the galaxy brain meme. Every day starts the same: a zoom lecture on today's learning objectives, then buddy up and start chomping on some problems. Pseudo, code, push, repeat. Le Wagon are running the course as a hybrid, half of our cohort are stuck outside mainland China. Some are in Hong Kong, maddeningly close but in the current situation they may as well be remoting in from the moon. One classmate is in London. Every day we can see him in his living room working with us through the night until by the evening's live code there's full-on daylight streaming through his curtains. And I thought I was resilient.
We spent Day 1 setting up our environments and, I suppose, quietly appraising ourselves. Did we belong here? How long until a teacher or fellow classmate pointed at us and said "they can't do this"? Perhaps this is just me. I've read up on imposter syndrome, but I think this was just first day trepidation. I needn't have worried anyway. The instructors had a graph in the classroom showing how our moods would peak and trough throughout the course. It's seemed pretty accurate so far but no matter how drained and stupid we might feel at the end of the day, no-one has had a cross word to say and the team spirit and good humor have been great.
We've started with Ruby, as someone who self-taught the basics of Python last year it's been a confidence-booster to begin with another high level dynamically typed language, even if I still try and use randint() for a random integer half the time. Then last week we moved into OOP with class inheritance. A friend back in London went through the same camp and said that the start is just you "drowning in a sea of knowledge". I don't feel that; everything so far has fitted into place like it was meant to be there. Not always immediately, but usually after a decent sleep. I'm finally starting to internalize that sleep is important after 28 years.
The trough will come, I'm not arrogant enough to think it won't. I'll bang my head against a concept at some point and I'll feel like crap. But my teammates will be there for me as will the teachers. I'm where I want to be and I'll trust the process.
This is the first blog post I've ever written so I'm going to be finding my style/voice for a little bit. Going forward I'm going to try and post as often as I can and get a little more into the technical side of what we're learning. For now it's been enough to barf some words up and clear my head a little. Stay safe and thanks for reading x
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