Month 1: Looking Back

I started this in the strangest way.  I am a gamer and in mid July, I read an article on Kotaku about the "Exceptional Beauty of Doom 3's Source Code".  I did not really read the article deeply but have since read it many times.  The article (re)flipped a switch and  reminded me that I was very interested in code in high school (around 1995).  I even worked a whole semester on a project in BASIC under one of the math teachers at my high school.

I did not pursue coding because I was already in the process of deciding to hate math at that point.  When I got to college I saw that one would have to take many math courses to do anything with computers and so I turned from it pretty quickly.  Everyone was pretty surprised because I was a computer geek from age 13 on and worked pretty consistently with them after I bought my first one in the summer of 1993.  I think tying computers and coding to math makes some sense, but we are also losing a lot of great people to this marriage.  Coding has math in it, but it is also about logic, creativity, and critical thinking.  I also did not code then because the software was so expensive.  I always wanted to learn Pascal, but it was $100s of dollars and I never could muster up that much desire.  Now, it is all more or less free which is so amazing!

At any rate, this article reminded me of coding and so I googled it a few days later and came to a kids coding website with inspiring interviews from Bill Gates, Facebook guy, and a host of others.  I was intrigued!  Shortly thereafter, I discovered CodeAcademy and since then I have been off and running.  Let's take stock of where we are now:

The Good:
(1) I love it!  Learning new commands and solving mysteries you previously did not understand is so refreshing.  I am no master, but I have come so far in a month and have really loved learning every bit I have.  Coding is super fun!  (Yesterday I worked on understanding ARGV in Ruby!)

(2) I am working on it every day, because I like it!  I wondered when I first started how long I would do this for.  I do not dread it and I do not do it because I want to "finish what I started".  I look forward to learning, finding new resources and gaining confidence and skill.  Over the past month I have done something with coding every single day.

(3) I have found many (too many?) resources ranging from Pine and Shaw's books to TreeHouse, Code Academy, and Code Newbie.  I have made friends and acquaintances and have come to really love the community.  It is welcoming and inspiring!

The Bad:
(1) I need to focus fire.  I am doing too many things at once.  Currently I am working on 3 books, TreeHouse, and Code Academy.  This is probably too many.

(2) I have nothing to show for my study yet outside of a basic shell of a Ruby text adventure game.

(3) I am still a bit confused by GitHub and how to share work and I do harbor a fear that I will never actually be able to create things on my own!

Where is this going?  I have no way of telling if coding will be my next career move, but right now I am absolutely in love with it and can't get enough of it!  I am definitely open to pursuing options in coding, but before I commit to that, I want to prove to myself that I can write a piece of code that works and is useful.  As always, thanks for reading!