My journey with programming from where I started to where I am at the moment. (I still suck)

Before France

Strange heading, I know. But it’s true. My programming journey starts about a month or before I moved to France. You could argue that I technically started in high school, but that was only HTML and CSS in one short high school class, so that doesn’t count. No, it started when I had just moved back home from Kansas, where I’d been living for the last 7 years (technically 6 as one of those years was spent living in France for study abroad). I don’t even really remembered what actually sparked my interest in programming itself, to be honest.

Anyway, I was bored at home one day after buying my new gaming laptop that I was going to take with me to France a month later to start my new job as an English Instructor (lecteur d’anglais) in a French university. So, I came across a Python course recommended to me either by the internet or my dad (I can’t remember) called Automate the Boring Stuff With Python by Al Sweigart (I didn’t know at the time that the ebook was free). I found the video course for like \(10 on Udemy and decided to give it a shot because \)10 is nothing, really. And I was hooked.

In France

I was having so much fun making my computer do things that would take me forever to do like organizing files, scraping things from the web, and printing things into spreadsheets and Word documents. It got a little frustrating from time to time, but that’s pretty normal when you’re first learning to program (and never goes away). But, I kinda stopped fiddling around with Python after I moved to France in the beginning. I was more focused on trying to find an appartment and getting settled into my new job than I was trying to learn this cool tool I could use.

After a while, I started feeling more comfortable in my new living situation and had decided to pick back up with programming as I was wanting to eventually transition out of teaching into a new career path, and I wanted it to be programming. But, there was one tiny problem; I’d forgotten pretty much everything I’d learned in my little Python course a few months prior… So, as is my nature, I went looking for a new starting ground because I knew I would get bored using the same course from the beginning to get myself back up to speed with how the language worked. Then I stumbled upon The Odin Project while browsing Reddit posts about programming courses.

Oh boy was I hooked on this course! I loved that it forced me to get intimate with programming documentation to solve my problems and to use the internet to my advantage as much as possible while learning and building mini-projects throughout the course. While I loved Automate the Boring Stuff, I was never really forced to consult the Python documentation for any of the projects because most of the projects were written out for you so you knew most of the time it would work without fail. But, The Odin Project was an exercise in patience and mastery over quick rewards. I would take my laptop to movie nights we hosted at the university for the students to work on my projects and my learning. I spent a solid 3-4 months plugging away at this course, enjoying every minute of it.

But then, I got bored and frustrated.

New Year, Old Struggles

I took a break from programming for a couple weeks to step away and take a breather. It was the new year and a new semester was upon us at the university and I had almost twice as many classes to teach as I had the previous semester. So, suffice it to say, I was busy and exhausted. My two weeks turned into about a month and a half without even realising what had happened.

When I finally found my groove again at work, I tried to jump back into my programming from where I’d left off. Obviously, that didn’t go as planned. I could barely understand my code and what it was doing and where I had left off when I was building my final project (a Reddit clone) for The Odin Project. I tried jumping into the Ruby track to get a refresher on programming basics and reignite my desire to learn this skill. But alas, I just got bored and frustrated. I had a hard time grasping concepts and figuring out projects to build that weren’t told to me. The projects I was told to build just didn’t interest me and I wanted nothing to do with them: tic-tac-toe, hangman, another calculator, a todo list, etc. But, I didn’t even know what I myself wanted to build. I just wanted to program to get a job.

So, I left programming to the side for a while, but I still consumed tons of programming related content.

Linux

All this time, I had been running all my programming through a Linux box on my Windows PC. I had started learning about Linux at the same time as learning to program. While at he airport hotel in Newark, New Jersey, I had decided to install Pop_OS! on my secondary laptop that I had used throughout grad school because I was bored. It had a ton of errors because I had decided to install it when Pop_OS! had a huge bug preventing installation or proper functionality after some update that had just been released. That was the most frustrating afternoon of my life and I almost quit with Linux then and there. But, I powered through.

Once I got settled into my new apartment about two weeks later, I got back to fiddling with Linux on what would become my “work” machine. As in, this was the laptop I would take to work and use if the office computers were occupied. And by this time, Pop_OS! was finally fully functional without major bugs for a newby to deal with. And, I loved it. It was so much fun using the terminal to do things I normally did with the mouse and a GUI. I was doing all my Odin Project learning in my Linux box on my gaming laptop, so I was already decently comfortable with navigating Linux thanks to the commands they force you to use.

So, even though I eventually gave up programming, I still had a connection to it through my use of Linux on my work computer. I would watch Linux content on YouTube all the time because I wanted to learn more about it. I would talk with my dad about the things I was learning and now able to do. I was learning how to use LibreOffice and make it compatible-ish with my files for work. And, I was learning more about privacy, security, and telemetry.

I eventually got to a point where I wanted to give Arch Linux a try. It had been about a year or so of using Pop_OS! exclusively and I wanted to give this “scary” distribution a try. I installed it probably 6 or 7 times in my Virtual Machine before finally deciding to install it on bare-metal. That was terrifying to say the least. But, first try on the bare-metal was a success. I had a fully functional Arch install with Gnome for my window manager (and I still use that install to this day).

I love the freedom of Arch and Linux in general. It actually makes me hate Windows the more I use it. Hell, I even tried to install Linux on my gaming laptop one week during the summer because I was bored and just wanted to give it a shot… That was a miserable week. I just could not for the life of me get any Linux distribution to work (AMD CPU and an Nvidia graphics card). It was an absolute nightmare and I eventually gave up at the end of the week because I was tired of spending hours just installing a distribution only for it to not work properly. Basically, I could generally get a distro installed, but games just wouldn’t work no matter how many internet fixes I tried, nor how many distros. Alas, back to Windows I went. At least I had a clean install of Windows now.

New job

After my two-years as an English instructor, I really wanted to change jobs and I had decided to stay in France. I found a job as an education administrator (gestionnaire de scolarité) for the physical therapy school and found a ton of extra free time because I no longer had to take work home with me. It all stayed at work. This meant that I had mental energy (sorta) to learn new skills on the side. So, I decided to give programming another go. This time, I decided to take Harvard’s CS50 Intro to Computer Science. That was a ton of fun and also rather frustrating. But, it was one of the best decisions I could’ve made because that course helped make sense of the programming concepts I was struggling with.

While going through the course and getting more comfortable in my new job I started figuring out things I wanted to build to help me in my job because there were tons of tasks I knew I could automate with the basic programming skills I had and the ability to read documentation was extremely helpful as well. And that’s what I did, build the programs I wanted/needed at work and that’s how I cemented my knowledge and comfort with programming itself. I stopped learning to code and started learning to program.

To this day, I still struggle immensely with programming and haven’t really built anything significant and noteworthy to land me a programming job, but during these last 3 years, I’ve learned more than I could’ve hoped for and hopefully I can eventually turn this knowledge into a job. But for now, I’ll just stick with what little I know and try to keep improving with new project ideas. I’ll keep learning about technology and getting more comfortable with it day by day. The important thing is, as much as I always hated reading it, is that you have to build things YOU want to build. Otherwise, you probably won’t learn as much. Build the simple programs a course asks you to build in order to learn the basic syntax of that programming language, but that eventually has to turn into a program that you want to build, otherwise you’ll get bored and quit like I did multiple times.

I could of course progress a lot faster if I would stick to building things that I’m told to build, but I also am not in a rush to become the greatest, most hireable newby programmer on the planet. I’m pretty content with where I’m at for the moment and will stick to building the projects I want to build because they excite me more than the “useful” prjects that could potentially land me a job. But, I know landing a job will be a lot more difficult than just the projects I have on hand to show off my capabilities. However, that’s a problem for future me and I want to keep enjoying my time with programming instead of forcing it.

It’s time to learn to enjoy the journey to the destination.