step 1- convince your engineering team to let you configure a dev environment on your computer

step 2- insist on figuring it out yourself

step 3- do not ask for help

step 4- throw your computer out the window in a violent rage

long story short- I am set up to start building shit and it took me a week to figure out how to get to the point where i could even pretend to start learning to code.

to dumb it down (since no one ever does)- a dev environment is basically a copy of all the code and databases that run something, but it sits on your local desktop. you play with changes here, then when you’re ready, push a copy of the code into the production world.

what they don’t tell you is how BLOODY FREAKING IMPOSSIBLE it is to set this up.
so you’re young and fresh and ready to start learning to code, and the FIRST thing you have to do is actually more challenging than writing the fucking code itself.

so be warned- it’s hard. the documents don’t account for 90% of the shit you need to do because it was written by someone on an ENTIRELY DIFFERENT COMPUTER. and they forgot that they already fucking HAD an SSH key on git hub. and they already had xcode. and they had access to the password to create the database.yml file. and oh yeah, this was written back when the most recent version of rails was 4.1.1 and no one has upgraded so if you don’t SPECIFICALLY install a random old version, yours won’t work, but you do THEN have to separately add a bunch of Gems or it won’t work. oh and you’ll obviously need to reconfigure a bunch of shit so you have access to actually install some of the stuff where you can’t call out SUDO because it’s in the library.

so yeah. fuck you last week.

i will say however, that when you get it to work for the first time, you WILL feel like you’ve just performed the single greatest engineering feat in the history of the company. and everyone should lower their eyes in your presence because you are a god among tech.

engineering is so dramatic, damn.