I Want to Be a Programmer

I love coding. Ever since middle school — messing with tables and hyperlinks to make silly websites on 321website with our HP and dial up modem — getting computers to do what I need them to do has been incredibly satisfying. But, like the father in “Cat’s in the Cradle” I’ve never spent enough time with it.

In an alternate universe where I’m an employee, I’d go through Launchcode or attend Turing School, and be highly satisfied to pound the keyboard all day.

As it is, I would be delighted to know enough to make things happen, scrape together functioning web applications. I currently use Javascript sloppily to make Google Apps Script bend to my will, and hacked together the original static website for Perennial City.

Michael Hartl’s Rails Tutorial helped me piece together all the little Codecademy lessons I trudged through, and understand how an application works front to back. Because of this, my first love is Rails. So it was quite a fortunate occurrence that a veteran RoR’er applied with Food Pedaler, and then followed up about me mentioning I wanted get good with this framework.

We’ve been working together for several months, and have the Perennial City site transferred over to a Rails application, slowly adding more features. I’ve gotten much better with Git, and am able read everything we’ve done. I want to make the most of this helpful relationship, and get to the point where the next application I can roll out pretty much solo.

Asking Mark what it would take to finally get to the point where I am capably creating software, he suggested to make sure I am coding a minimum of 10–15 hours a week.

I’m pretty sure I can do this. And as it seems I can handle simple and specific daily commitments, I’m going to call it a minimum of an hour and a half per day, and see where that takes me. Starting out, exercises or actual projects will count. Nothing specific, just getting behind the computer screen, typing into a text editor and terminal. I think I may even make reading code examples fair game if I’m lacking inspiration. I just want to make sure I’m giving this passion enough attention to flourish.