one week as a develubber

I wrote this on 01-21-17, one week after I started calling myself a develubber aka engineer.

one week as a develubber

Jeff sent me this blog post. I got to read it this morning and it made me feel better about my progress over the last week.

In the past week, I read a react book. I think I understood 50% of it. I tried to apply my learning to fixing some bugs in wizard and failed (but learned). And then, I got to apply what I learned about react to help build our new citations feature.

I got the opportunity to pair with Jeff Tuesday to Friday. I felt like I learned the most during the time spent working with Jeff. I think on the first day I felt that I understood 40% of what we were doing. On Wednesday I felt like I understood 20% of what we were doing. On Thursday because on Wednesday I felt like I was more lost, I was less optimistic. But then on Friday I felt like I understood 90% of what we were doing.

I think one of the biggest things that is holding me back is I don't feel safe with code when Jeff is not around, but that started to change on Friday when we split and we started to work on the same problem in parallel. Yay!

One thing that really helped me was when Jeff showed me how he writes comments outlining breaking down the bigger feature into smaller bite sizes. I believe I fully understand what needs to be executed, I just don't know how to write it in the language of code, in this case javascript.

I think one of the biggest things holding me back is my own self confidence and the fact that I'm not familiar with specific languages. When asked to write an if then statement in javascript, my mind literally pulls a blank. I can explain the concepts of what needs to happen in English, but I cannot translate that English into javascript. I want to work on that. I think if I work on understanding the syntax of specific languages we use, I can get past this problem of self confidence.

My general feeling right now is that I conceptually understand what steps are involved in building the things we try to build, but I lack the foundational knowledge of how all the tools function because of my lack of experience. This is a good thing because I get a good idea concrete steps I can take toward improving my foundational knowledge (e.g. learn javascript syntax, use the CSS resources online to become familiar with common properties used, etc.).

Don't give up. Don't get too discouraged. Keep practicing. Practice makes perfect.