When I was young, one of my friends had a dad who was a programmer. Perl, to be specific.
My dad, back at home, spent his days on the phones convincing strangers to buy a product he had been briefed on. But this guy, from my perspective, created entire worlds. Massive databases might threaten to blow us all out of an airlock; but through his wizardry, they would remain kind and loyal.
Since then, I've wanted to lean into the development space. I fiddled around with Python when I was 17 on the advice of my physics teacher, then immediately forgot about it. I picked up a book on MySQL when I was 20, but had to lay it back down because it had no immediate relevance to my current challenges. Over the past few years I've taken various tutorials on Ruby, Java, and Bash scripting only to eventually forget what they were all about.
There has been a bright side to my typical techie laziness. By getting a jack-of-all trades perspective on how different languages work, I've uncovered some of the basic patterns that they incorporate into their logic (not unlike human language). You have a word for and and a word for not. You have packages that incorporate new features. Sometimes you even get cute mascots, like the Perl camel, wandering across a metaphysical desert searching for the next oasis.
At any rate, I've decided to start taking these learning paths more seriously. People talk about the desert of despair that early developers often stumble into, and I've been in this open erg for nearly all of my adult life. Sure, I've been able to blast out a short script or two, fix unusable code for a more modern environment, or just Read The Friendly Error Message. But that's not enough to reach the career I'm aiming for.
I want to confront the full-stack challenges.
I want to put in the time and hit the numbers.
I want this iteration of hartr.net to be the 2.0, not the end-goal.
So, to this end, I'm taking up a few coding challenges. Namely Bento and The Odin Project. Neither of them claim to be easy, but ease is not what I'm after.
My plans are to spend an hour or two every working day (Saturdays off) on both of these sites. For the past month, I've been studying Hebrew on Duolingo, and every day that mouldering owl reminds me that I need to get back to remembering terms for household objects and family relationshps. If I can spend the next 4 weeks doing the same thing 6 days per week, it should be a good milestone.
So; mes enfants: To keep myself honest, I hereby promise to you and to myself that I will check back in with you on June 12 to inform you of what my progress looks like. Maybe I'll even share a link to my latest git activity. Hopefully I'll be proud of what I have to show you then.
Thanks for reading, as always. Godspeed and good luck to you!
Update: it's 8 days later, and here I am following a free YouTube CSS tutorial:
