Coding Confidence

This week as I was coding, I encountered some aha moments. In previous weeks, my moments of joy were centered on “Seriously, I got this thing to work!?!” Those were nice moments of punctured euphoria sandwiched by the long, tedious bouts of frustrating failures.

This week, though, I had a moment where I got something to work (the timer), and it felt nice, yes, but it also motivated me to revisit material we had covered in weeks prior. First, the brief story: I was trying to get the timer to show up with the text function baked into p5, and all I could get was the actual text of the code from the getPrettyEllapsedTime function in the Timer.js file. I tried messing with the syntax twelve different ways, and decided to snoop around a little online. I knew I was close, though. Finally, I saw some code somewhere that was similar to what I was working with and noticed, within a text function being called, one of the elements called also was a function. And when a function is called, you need those parens —(). That’s all I needed. Spent an hour playing with that mess, and it was just the parentheses missing. So that got me thinking, I don’t really have this function bull down yet, do I?

So I went back and spent some quality time with functions, watching some Shiffman videos and talking the logic of coding through with someone who had coded in the past—my wife, whose last programming experience involved FORTRAN and BASIC in a job she had in Venezuela as IT in a bank. It was a few years ago she worked in programming, yes, but the logic holds up enough to get my Eeyore/Piglet brain to grasp it. And I should mention my time in last week’s lab with Diana was tremendously helpful as well. Bouncing ideas off someone else seemed to really work well for me in the nitty-gritty of code writing, at least in this exercise, though I’m not sure I recognized it away.

My point here is to say that I felt a bit different coding this week. Last week, Courtney mentioned similar sentiments, relating her experience to gaining confidence. I’ve had those momentary bursts of YAY I GOT IT!!!!, but going through and recalling and relearning how functions and the logic of objects worked really helped me get the counter up and running for the third daily. I’ve had moments where (invoking Chun) I felt somewhat sovereign. Like Chun notes, however, I think such a feeling and experience will be fleeting and is largely illusory. I does feel good, though, to feel like a king for a moment, if I may indulge for a blink before the opaque aristocracy of technics upends my fleeting reign.