First Day of School

Welcome to the Iron Yard

The first week of class. First day of school since graduating from Ball State. I was eager and excited to start to learn coding. Danny (my friend who told be about Iron Yard and helped me to get in touch with the program) had warned me on how intense the work was, and how much time and effort it would take. But everything I had learned and looked into for this made me want to get into it more and more. I was holding out for those first words on the first day for the course! They're always so inspiring and motivating! They set the tone for the course!

"...This will not be easy" is not typically something people enjoy hearing from a teacher... Especially when it seems to be echoed by the staff and any recent graduates of the program you meet. It was safe to say, any and all preparation I had for the course in terms of its intensity was now validated.

Even still, I was determined to give it everything. After all, the more I sweat now, the easier it will be in the real situation. (Some real-life Richard Marcinko for ya.)

For the first day, I was glad to have done the pre-work for Ruby. The homework focused on 'if, elsif, else' statements, which was easy enough, I felt. And the class is set up for you to push your limits and really go for it. I was dead-set on pushing as far as I could take this...until I decided to push for user input, prompting to keep the user from having any answer that wouldn't prompt a response, and asking for new input. At one point, I literally stopped, looked at what I had on screen, and said to myself, "...what have I done...?" 

(If you'd like to see the extent of my nesting issues)

Lesson 1: don't create your own downfall.

I was happy to find that whereas it may have become a bit of a monster, my efforts seemed to be in the right place. Chris (the instructor) informed me I will likely be a fan of next week, when we actually get into user input.

All in all, nothing says "first day of school" like having your push for success blow up in your face, but then finding out it's not as bad as you thought. Right?