so how are things this month… you know that scene in terminator 2 where the T-1000 gets blown into a bunch of pieces and then slowly starts pooling together before forming that cop guy again? I’m past the blown up part and have moved on to the… “pooling” …part.

What I’m trying to say is 1- things are coming together and 2- the better I get at programming, the worse writer I become.

I’ve been getting faster at writing algorithms, having been contributing tiny little fixes to the code base, spend about half my time in engineering and am building a realistic yet still confident picture of my future.

The short of it is, I’m going to be a slow, inexperienced and generally crap engineer for a while. And then I’m going to be good. And then great. the kind of great that comes from fear of being an impostor, that motivates you to learn faster and work harder to keep up and compete with people you have no business comparing yourself to, but really can’t help it, because it’s what you want.

In other news- I started my Ruby class last night. Trying not to get cocky but I ended up helping the TAs help people install everything, since I’d already done it. And the book that the syllabus is based on, I’ve already read. Regardless, I’m still looking forward to having a bunch of humans at my disposal to bother with questions. More on the bootcamp when I’m further in.

In more fun news- I’ve started filming a parody montage training video, that shows all the phases of learning to program. Mostly, I think it will be funny. But also a start to developing my “brand”. It’s becoming evident that what i’m trying to do is somewhat unique and could possibly serve to help other people figure this ish out.

If i’m being honest about what *actually* motivated me to really give this a serious go, it was an offhand comment from a girl i had one conversation who she quit her job in marketing, took a bootcamp and got a job as an engineer for twitter 6 months later. All it took was for me to hear about *ONE* person doing it and it gave me the push I needed. So I’ve been considering making it a public part of who I am and thus a video. It’s being shot chronologically, and i’m hoping to end it on a close up of a title change in linked in or something, so it won’t be done until… well, it’s “done” 🙂

what else… what else…

oh! I keep putting off an entry about my thoughts on “women in tech” but I am going to my first woman-y conference next week, so the short of it is, i’m slowly embracing it… with caution. more on that later.

okay off to unnecessarily changing algorithms to leverage objects and classes, thereby increasing the lines of code ten-fold with no real benefit except learning how to use objects and classes which is impossible to see in small examples but the only way to start because designing an entire code base isn’t exactly an option so yeah. learning. yay!