Programming Therapy

Sorry, internet. I say sorry a lot. I grew up adjacent to Canada via boat or Moose.

Is the author actually sorry? She is not so sure.

That said, I have to unload some of my programming baggage on you, The Internet Reader. There are many things I am working on at once and journaling privately about them isn't helping. I can figure out why I get distracted and excited easily. I can balance my diet and exercise and social time like a good, perfunctory little rat. But how will I ever sort this shit out?

We, The Internet, have diagnosed perfectionism. But that's not a full-on mental health problem. The treatment is taking cold showers, so to speak. Looking right at my comfortable water temp and bravely cranking it to the floor.

1. I am 90% ready for my TensorFlow certificate test (that doesn't mean I'd get a 90%. It is pass/fail. Fail? I can't knock that, really, as I have gotten a C in a class and the teacher bumped my grade up to an A on the last day. Some curve. An anonymous internet test requires a different side of my personality to prepare for. Does it demonstrate job readiness? I don't think because I took the TensorFlow certificate that I know anything about ML.

So it is not just perfectionism, is it? It is an unbelievably pointless sense of humility in such an abstract way, it literally doesn't correlate to reality. First off, Me, you can't just have humility. You have to be cocky. It is how one protects oneself from bad guys. I wouldn't go through a dark parking lot at night whimpering and moping before I slowly unlock my car. In a whine, I say to the dark bushes about three meters from my car, "Why won't anyone come along right now and guess what actions I would think are appropriate?"

No! I stand tall and project my sharpened survival instincts. Duh. And as far as I can ever remember, nothing creepy has even happened to me in a parking lot.

I am trying to say I need to go take the test and fail it. $100 well spent and if I pass, even better. There are practice tests for other exams but I really do want this cert and I mean it.

1. I went and started the fast.ai course before I took the TF test.

Why, woman human, why do you do this to yourself?

Well, inner voice, I got to lesson 4 of fast.ai's Deep Learning for Coders and the book came in the mail that day. What a book it is. And on the videos, Jeremy Howard and Rachel Thomas show the most in-depth reasoning of Gradient Descent I have ever seen. How these things are derived is important and if I didn't feel ready, I wasn't ready.

Taking two or more MOOCs on the same subject just might be the way it is in this unholy year.

1. I keep learning Swift. Even when it isn't going well and all my stuff is all bugs and I am too afraid to show it off, I can write about it on dev.to.

I am writing other content now so I really appreciate this outlet and thanks for reading if you read this far. As a human woman in tech, I feel like my personal phenotypical presentation is important to draw attention to but I would hope you'd read even if I were a being from an unseen constellation.