Dawson… Miss this guy…
Hey everyone. It’s probably Tuesday when your reading this, because I won’t post it till Tuesday.
But I’m writing it Monday evening at the end of my first full day at the Iron Yard.
I thought I might take a few minutes just to “vomit words” onto a page.
In Good Company
One of the coolest things that I’ve gotten to experience over the last 24 hours or so is meeting a lot of new people. I haven’t met everyone that is a part of the two cohorts that are currently in session, but I’m slowly getting it done.
I find it fascinating to hear the stories that come along with each individual person. Each one of us has a unique story about the things that led us to the place where we are today.
Speaking of the place we are today, it is really neat to be a part of a group headed in a similar direction. For me and 14 other students that means learning Ruby on Rails development. For 15 other students it means learning mobile engineering.
In a lot of ways we are all taking a huge plunge together. It’s good to know that I’m in the company of a bunch of really good people.
My Brain is Tired
I think the first thought that crosses my mind is that I’m tired.
But it isn’t the same kind of tired that happens when you sit at a computer all day and do stuff over and over that you already know you know how to do.
Instead it is that kind of tired that comes from banging my head against the wall numerous times while trying to figure out how to make something work. Today the wall that I needed to figure out how to get through was how to take user input compare it to an item that is randomly chosen from a list.
The user then needed to get some feedback about how “close” they were to the correct answer…
Seems a bit simpler now than it did a few hours ago.
My brain is tired.
The Coffee is Really Good
Fortunately for me and my brain, the coffee here at the Atlanta Tech Village (ATV) is really good. It’s from a company called Octane…
The coffee is included in my membership at the ATV… so I’ve drank quite a bit today and I fully expect to drink a lot more tomorrow.
The Traffic is Bad
Right now I’m sitting at the ATV waiting for an event that will start in about an hour. There are two reasons I’m waiting.
The first reason is that the traffic outside right now is really bad. Like, really, really bad. Coming from a town that has four stop lights (depending how you count), Atlanta traffic is quite horrible.
The second reason that I’m going to hang around is that the event actually sounds pretty interesting. The premise is that five startups (small companies with big ideas) are going to get to pitch their business to a crowd of interesting and interested listeners. The startup world is pretty fascinating!
Feeling Out the Future
I don’t give a lot of credibility to feelings.
Actually that probably isn’t true. I probably give more credibility to feelings than I should.
Regardless of how I feel about feelings, here is how I’m feeling at the end of today. The next few weeks look really stretching.
Firstly in the elastic area that hopefully exists in my mind. There is a lot of “stuff” that will need to find its way into my brain. I’m finding that this is actually more difficult in the thinking of how a program works than in how to actually write it. The syntax of how the language of Ruby works is just the beginning.
This should be no surprise as we think about English for example. A rudimentary understanding of how English works isn’t that difficult to accomplish. If you want to create a New York Times best seller… you’re going to have to go a bit beyond just putting words together on a page.
Secondly the stretch will happen in my “social circle.” In some ways this is the scarier of the two areas for me personally… but it’s also one of the coolest things about being a part of the Iron Yard and the Atlanta Tech Village.
In the same way that learning to program is different from learning to code… Meeting people and building relationships with people are also different.
The Conclusion of this Matter
And that my friends is the end of this epistle. I have a sneaking suspicion that I won’t have as much time or brainpower to write as time goes on, but as much as I can I will try to stick to this schedule of Tuesday and Thursday postings on the blog, along with a picture for every other day of the week.
Take care… be good…