What once felt like being lost at sea in a life raft with minimal rations is beginning to feel like a stimulating speed run through a maze you already know half the route through.
With a background in mechanical engineering and mild coding experience, I expected my initial transition into the software developer space to go differently. It was more challenging upfront and smoother on the backend than I expected it to be. Flatiron School posed our learning journey with the following depiction called “magic of the internet” and boy I thought they were kidding.
At first glance it might seem like a trivial journey, but I can assure it is not drawn to scale. Everyone’s transition through each phase varies and for me the middle was a painful period of growth. I never had any intention of quitting but your mind certainly makes you question yourself while you are there. The good news is, on the other side of the “swamp of despair” is greener grass. I was surprised to find that once you develop your coding acumen it flows out of you quite smoothly. It’s not a fight to build things you already have experience building, it’s more a matter of putting pen to paper.
Within two weeks me and my peers were already using fetch methods to grab data from open source APIs to build our first singe page applications. Personally, I was drawn in by the idea of making a random brewery and cocktail generator. Something along the lines of, if you get this drink you have to go get the ingredients to make it for fun kind of thing. Somehow I ended up on a Marg Maker application. I suppose that’s also a part of the journey.
Not only are we making real, live webpages and developing marketable skills along the way, we are immersing ourselves in fundamentals of programming that roll over into other languages. We display our Javascript, HTML, and CSS understanding in this project but we must use array iteration, object syntax and event listening to manipulate the DOM to get our desired outcomes.
I suppose there is no better way to learn most things than to be put into the position of “sink or swim”. If you keep kicking, you’ll be surprised where you can end up. Although I may still be engineering solutions, it is dramatically different from mechanical applications. Before, I may be relying heavily on structural theory to ensure a bridge doesn’t collapse because of undue oscillations or a tank explode because of improper welding design. Here, I want my code to run smoothly and effectively, there is artistic wiggle room. All in all, my transition into a new field is fresh and exciting.