Here I finally am at the end of my Flatiron journey. I have learned several programming languages, and I finally have enough vocabulary in them to make educated guesses that actually … work! This helps a ton with refactoring, but it is the best feeling to not have to Google something because I just have an intuition on how to do it … even something brand new. Every hurdle and bug is its own learning experience, and I’m constantly figuring out how to do new things and to do old things better.
Of all the metaphors we use to better understand technology, my favorite is comparing spoken langauge to programming language. To that end, I think a passion for spoken language translates well into a career in coding.
JavaScript is fun, it’s powerful, and although you can do so much with Ruby and its correlating frameworks Sinatra and Rails, JavaScript to me truly feels like a real job skill. That and I personally prefer the curly bracket/semicolon way of arranging lines of code; it just looks better and makes sense to me.
This project was the first time I thought of my coding abilities in a real-world context. In other words, it was a paradigm shift from coding something fun for my own entertainment to thinking of what I’ve learned as skills, as job skills. What a joy: to learn something productive that is also so much fun. It’s fascinating to think of all the people involved in creating these langauges and Ruby gems, that I could be a part of something bigger and contribute to it meaningfully. Great fun.
If you would have asked me at any point of my childhood what I wanted to be when I grew up, I would have told you Video Game Designer. I loved drawing levels, creating my own characters, and absolutely obsessing over the few video games my strict parents would let me play. They amazed and inspired me. I even dabbled in some light game design in middle school. They were my passion. Making a website for collecting game consoles was an obvious choice for how I wanted to tackle this project, and I had a lot of fun doing it.