Making baby steps

In my search of programmer enlightenment I needed to start somewhere. I was thinking about actually going to college and getting a degree. It always bothered me that both of my parents had college degrees but I never got mine. Isn’t it supposed to be the other way around? Well, my husband convinced me that if I really wanted to learn to code for the industry, not just learn theoretical computer science, it would be better if I took some specialized engineering classes or courses. This approach appealed to me because I could try it out for a while without committing to an expensive 4-year process. I could always get my degree later if the “simply learn to code” gambit failed.

We did our research, looked into a bunch of coding bootcamps. Some were really pricey but came with promises of post-graduation employment. I decided to take baby steps and am now working through free online classes with Udacity to get a feel of what it would be like to learn remotely.

Udacity offers a few interesting and challenging courses; I decided to start with Python. From the beginning I knew I’d have a few obstacles, the main one being time. Even though my daughter is in school, I still have errands and responsibilities. Unfortunately, my family is of no help in caring for the child or running our household. As I mentioned previously, my husband works really hard to support us, so he’s completely out of the picture during business hours, save for support and encouragement by text message. The rest of my extended family are either unwilling, too old, dead, or too crazy to help me, so I’m pretty much on my own. After school pick-up, I take my daughter to swimming, gymnastics, or some other extracurricular activity, so for me coding time is over at that time.

Even though I’m not a total beginner, I haven’t programmed in a while. When you don’t do something in a long time, you tend to forget all about it. All of the interesting Udacity classes required knowledge of loops, functions and if statements. So on my first day of classes I decided to simply go over those basic concepts and refresh my memory. For loops, while loops, if statements, else if and all that jazz. :)

My hope is that these baby steps will bring me a little closer to my goal every day. Slow & steady does it!