Surviving Phase-1 at Flatiron

Wow. What a change. A year ago I was living in Texas and now I'm almost through my first three weeks at a software Engineering school. This field couldn't be more different than anything I have ever done in the past. I have always tried to tell myself that I should give this field a try, and now that I finally convinced myself to take the leap, I am so happy that I did.

This new experience hasn't come without its challenges. I never went to college or any type of school for the simple reason of having no idea what I wanted to do for a career. So the simple fact of having to get myself back into the mindset of being in a classroom has been a struggle of its own. The first week was probably the hardest just trying to get a strategy for note-taking and as dumb as it may sound, how to learn again. With that being said, the struggle finally ended, for this phase at least. I was surprised at how much my knowledge of JavaScript exploded in just the first week. Practicing everything the second week was fun which surprised me. Some things were still very confusing and frustrating, but the feeling of everything finally clicking was worth it. There are still a lot of things that I have to learn with JavaScript alone but I'm excited to keep learning.

The main focus of the class so far has been on DOM manipulation. I'm learning just how many different ins and outs there are to it and just how much I will always have to learn. It is a pretty exciting thing to learn just because of the satisfaction of being able to see what you have done almost as soon as you do it. Finding out just how much I can do with even just the small amount of knowledge I have has continued to surprise me. Working on my project for this phase is helping me realize that even more. I'm still getting used to my work being primarily on a computer because until this point I have almost always worked in jobs that are outdoors almost the entire time. That change alone has been pretty rough, but getting better every day.

I'm using some of my past experiences for my project at the moment. I'm displaying information and pictures about the ten most destructive forest fires in Texas history. I'm keeping it simple for this one and keeping to just fires in Texas, but this is giving me possible ideas of what I can eventually do for a final project. Looking for this kind of information online was pretty frustrating for me so if there was something I could build that could be used in the future to make it easier I think that could be really satisfying. I think that that level of build is a little out of the range of my abilities at the moment but I think it would be an interesting attempt later on. I think that a hiccup I could run into is that a lot of the information is kept a little bit hidden. That may not be the case, but I do think I could run into a lot of instances where I will need to make information requests from different agencies across the country. All of these things are the reasons that I'm sticking with the ten fires that I have now from Texas.

I'm excited to see what else I can do with the tools that I have and what else this course is going to teach me. There are still adjustments that I'm making for living in NYC for the first time but everyday gets easier.