Hackbright Week 5

Field trip to Twilio today. It was fun and really cool to see the inside of a big successful company.

I'm kind of at the point that I'm not really keen on HTML or CSS or JSON or any of the front end stuff. I'm trying to stay open to it, but I just don't find the same level of interest in it as I did with OOP. Perhaps it's because I'm just not as familiar with any of the aforementioned languages. But, I don't find them very fun or very logical.

I was told that AJAX and JavaScript and HTML are all basically hacks. (This was from a programmer. I think he works in Java). I'm trying to stay opened minded about them, but I just don't care for them at all. They seem ridiculously complicated and kind of stupid... maybe just not as clean.

Insight for the week or this term... Humility was it the last time. This time, it is still humility and acceptance. I was used to being at the top of my class or towards the top, but then I went to UCLA and wasn't at the top. I got used to being towards the top again at Ai and in other places. Here at Hackbright, I'm in the middle toward the bottom. Not the very bottom, but definitely not at the top. And quite frankly, I'm ok with that. I get annoyed when a friend might lump me at the bottom, but it's kind of true as I'm not quite getting everything.

When they told me at the beginning not to get competitive, I agreed with that. I just didn't expect to be so slow in picking stuff up. I'm pretty sure it's because I'm still a noob when it comes to programming, and I'll get it, but right now, it's slow going. I think that when people tell you not to become competitive, they put it in the perspective that you shouldn't look down on your fellow cohort members. I think you should also include yourself in that group. Don't look down on yourself if you are not getting it as fast as others. Don't think that you're a dumbass because you're not getting the script to work. It's experience and learning more syntax. Making the connections between words/braces/curly braces/brackets and such.

I'm looking forward to next week. I think that a lot of the issues of understanding that I have right now will get cleared up when I'm working on my own project. I'll have a personal stake in it. As many of my programmer friends have told me, "Having a project is the best way to learn how to program." Right now, I have enough knowledge to be dangerous, but not efficiently dangerous. Hopefully, I'll become efficiently dangerous during project time.