My name is Mason Ellwood, and I’m currently working on Flatiron School’s Online Full Stack Web Development Program. Each week, I’ll be writing about my experience, what I’m learning, and tips on learning to code.
Throughout my courses that I have taken within The Flatiron School so far, I have realized one major thing. Holy smokes I have a lot to learn…. It was like when I got my first web job roughly five years back. In my mind at that time, the internet was this small thing.
It is kind of like a car to people who do not work on cars. A cars sole purpose is to get you to point A or B. But once you dive a little deep into that thing that you spend a lot of your time in or doing, like the internet, it turns into this very complex thing that is dependent on a lot of other pieces to make it work effectively. And not just the steering wheel and the gas pedal.
Like this example, the internet in my eyes was finally being realized. I found out that everything I knew about the internet was basically the big toe. Not even that, but the tip of the toenail. And as I slowly hiked the toenail, I got a glimpse of what that was attached to. And then inched my way forward and saw what that was attached to, you get the point.
What I am trying to say is, development is not an easy profession to master. You have to be well versed, intuitive and have the range to see the bigger picture. Which like everything take a lot of stinking time. The legs that make up the internet are insane, but with patience and practice, you can learn to master them like anything else.
When I am greeted with a new problem, from getting loops to work to ad code implementation I would probably say I spend 90% of my time reading about how to solve the problem, and one roughly 10% of that time implementing. But like everything that is how it is. Preparation and planning, only after this, implementation can become a seamless extension of that.
When I first started programming, my biggest issue with it was that every circumstance was unique to the next. Conceptually everything was roughly the same, but the pieces never quite fit into each other, even though I just completed a very similar issue. There was this constant adaptation to the next situation, which made it feel like you never quite had a grasp on what the code was actually doing. But this has become easier. I see the code as tools now. And each object or block of code is a new puzzle piece, which brings everything closer to completing a task.
So to say that programming is easy, I would not say it is, but like everything, practice increases proficiency. The Flatiron School has enabled me to increase proficiency and helped me see how all this “stuff” connects to each other, bringing together the whole picture.
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