So close, yet so far away.

Any time you take on a new hobby or start to learn a new subject, there comes a point where the shininess wears off, the allure starts to fade, and it becomes work.

That's how programming has been for me, honestly. At first everything was awesome. Each and every little "intro" tutorial would yield a small but huge success, and the vast amount of knowledge available was awe-inspiring. I wouldn't hesitate to show off my simple programs (Hello World, anyone?!?!) and revel in my awesomeness.

But after a few months of continuous study, fun time is over, and the real work begins. You get to the intermediate tutorials (good ones are relatively more difficult to find, I might add) and now you are looking at weeks of work. No more freshly finished programs every hour or so, we are talking days and weeks! This is where I start to lose interest. The instant gratification is waning, the results appear to be slowing; the fun is gone. So I stop. I find something new, or just do nothing new for a while. 

If you know what I am talking about, then you know how it feels looking back on all the times this has happened, and seeing a bunch of unfinished dreams and ideas that were never realized. I started to believe that this was just the way things were, and the way they were gonna be for me. 

All it takes is grit. 

See, I have been learning how to code for almost 6 months now. I am well into the "work" stage, and I haven't given up. It's hard! Every day I make what feels like inches of progress. That tutorial I am working on: 8 days in, averaging 5 hours a day of work. Not even half-way finished. But I know that the end product is going to be exponentially more gratifying than those initial programs. 

What's more, just the fact that I can say that I am still at it feels amazing. Knowing that I am pushing myself further than I can ever remember in the past, and that there is something waiting for me on the other side of all of this: a career.

This is about more than learning a skill to better myself, this is about bettering myself by doing things differently than I always have. 

Back to work!

So many variables!

In the short amount of time that I have been at this, I have devised seemingly hundreds of "paths" to take to become a developer. There are so many languages, text editors, frameworks, etc. that it can be overwhelming to think about. So I took some advice, and focused more on the type of programs I'd like to make: the type of work I think I'd like to end up doing. From there, I worked my way back.

I ended up deciding to take on Ruby. Since I am working on a Windows laptop (for now) I went ahead and used RailsInstaller to get everything up and running. It was quick and easy, with no hiccups whatsoever.

*Since I am new to all of this, I believe that doing as much from the command line as possible is best. However, I do not plan on working with Windows for much longer, and rather than spend a few hours trying to learn DOS and Powershell, I will do it the right way when I get that Mac

My immediate goal is to complete the application process for a web development boot camp called App Academy. I only know what I have read about them, so I won't turn this post into an advertisement. This would be the quickest, albeit absolutely toughest route to take to become a paid developer. Wednesday is my personal deadline for being fully prepared and taking the first coding challenge.

If I don't get accepted, it will not deter me one bit. I know deep down that this is what I want to do, and that with enough work I can get really really good at it. And I feel very fortunate to live in a time that all of the information I need is at my fingertips. There are countless stories of people who are self taught that now have rewarding careers as programmers. It's a beautiful thing.

It's getting late, and my brain is fried from 3 hours of studying. I have been working through Chris Pine's Learn to Program. Yes, I would definitely recommend it to a friend!

Until next time...