Person: How Many Languages Are You Learning?

A Year of Code

A few weeks ago, I marked a year since I started coding every day. Last year, for me, began with a breakup. I remember c…

“Someone special I knew wrote, “The price we pay for living full authentic lives is occasionally having our hearts broken.” I think that that’s true. Pain isn’t beautiful or poignant, but sometimes, if you can get through it, it contextualizes what comes later. A year is a short time. You never think that that’s long enough to substantially change what you’re capable of doing, but what you choose to do every day eventually shapes who you are. A year ago, as much as I loved tech, I wasn’t sure I’d ever want to be in engineering or study computer science. Since then, I’ve learned six programming languages, taken seven CS classes, and worked on twenty-odd personal projects. There’s nothing intrinsically meaningful about a GitHub streak, but, somewhere along the way, I started remembering what it felt like to be myself.”

holy smokes. #GOALS

I’m tearing up and inspired. This is amazing.

a team in last year’s robotics class forgot to comment out a line of joke code so during the final their robot completed the assigned task in autonomous mode, stopped directly in front of the professor, printed “HEADED HOME, MOTHERFUCKERS” to its LCD, and drove back to base

People think coding / debugging means highly concentrated furious typing, but mostly it’s just angrily staring at the screen for long periods of time waiting for the problem to solve itself

How do you make the jump from like, completing CodeAcademy lessons to actually conceptualizing and building a program?

Honestly, it is really tough. People seem to make it sound like it’s a lot easier but if you’re doing it by yourself, you really have to work at it!

What you could start doing is drafting up a thought in your head from any idea; say you think "I have this problem and it could be solved this way”. Transform that thought into a solution and use it! It’s going to be a bit tougher since CodeAcademy can’t teach you the logic of everything, but it will start to get easier and easier as time goes on! 

I would also suggest maybe looking at school websites for Computer Science, as a lot CS teachers will post their assignments on a website and you can use those to base projects off of!

me: starts looking at material for my programming languages class next quarter

me: stops looking

Making changes to the live site.

by Nathan W. Pyle

Computer Science

*screams into the public static void*