My Ruby experience.

Coming into this project I was unsure. Unsure of myself, unsure of my ability, unsure of my knowledge and mostly unsure if I could succeed in finishing it.

I have a history of not completing tasks, whether from losing interest or giving up after feeling overwhelmed. I was completely overwhelmed in the first week and achieved almost nothing but a growing frustration and a feeling of self doubt. I then came up with a plan. I was excited to get this going and as I was going through it I became more and more relieved to be finally finishing something I set out to do. Then I had a meeting about my project and was informed that in the work I had been doing, almost none would actually be usable for the assessment.

Then came freak out number two. This time was different, this time it was followed with ok I now have direction, lets go. I then proceeded to do what I thought I couldn't. I started coding for hours on end everyday. I learned about how .dig is indispensable for working through apis. I realized how necessary binding.pry is in every case and how learning to pay more mind to every aspect of the program you are writing is. I also learned that I may have found a career path I will enjoy, a lot.

One of the toughest parts of all of it beyond my own anxieties was what i jokingly called my final boss, as in a discussion with my cohort lead there was a reference to videogames in the way you save a lot in more challenging ones. I had an array of hashes, simple enough, but I had to check against the value in the second key to see if I need to print out the value of the first one or not. I was stumped for quite some time. In the moment, on the car ride home, that i realized how to solve that problem I learned one of the most important things. Stop staring at your screen and go think somewhere else.

In all I learned a lot from this about coding, about how far I have to go to be “good” at this but I completed it and to me that is one of the better milestones I have achieved in sometime.