October 4th, 2016
week 3 at academy pittsburgh
Well, it’s week 3 at Academy Pittsburgh and I think it’s time for an update!
So, I guess I'll go back and address some of the worries I had at the beginning of the session and address those…
1.) How am I going to pay attention 8 hours a day in class?!?! I’m a pretty focused person when I want to be but 8 hours a day?! Yikes.
—Coffee. Literally, the answer to this question is coffee.
2.) Sleep. God, I hope I don’t fall asleep in class. I really need to get on a better schedule no more staying up past midnight for me over these next 12 weeks.
—I repeat: Coffee.
3.) Parking. No matter how much I parallel park in Pittsburgh, it still freaks me out. Especially since I might have to parallel park on a hill!
—Heh. Yeah, parking sucks. I got my car towed AND a parking ticket and that was awful. Gonna try to fight it and see if I can get my money back for the towing… hopefully I can.
4.) Will people like me? Will people notice how nervous I am the first day?
—Everyone was nervous the first day. Everyone. And the people are sooooo nice!! My classmates, John, Josh, everyone at WorkHard Pittsburgh: extremely nice. Not to mention the people on the Slack channel are so helpful! The previous attendees are on Slack and combined with them and everyone else, you ask a question and 20 people are there in a matter of 5 minutes to help you out. Everyone is so supportive and funny and although I don’t know everybody personally, there’s a definite sense of comradery I think we all felt with each other after just a few days. And I’m pretty sure people like me.
5.) Am I gonna fall behind in class? Will I be able to keep up with the workload? I’m a hard worker and eager to learn but I hope I’m not too overwhelmed most of the time.
The program moves fast, but as long as you work hard and seek help when you need it, you’ll be okay. I was told that it’s really important not to fall behind on the exercises, so I’m keeping it my mission to always try to complete each one, no matter how many questions I may have to ask or how many Google searches will have to be made. We have days where we want to bang our heads on the walls and days where we feel like geniuses. It evens out.
6.) Rush hour. Not looking forward to it. Especially with the Liberty Bridge being off limits until further notice.
-Okay yeah, the traffic is awful. But! The Liberty Bridge is open now so instead of taking me an hour and a half each day to get there, it only takes me an hour. Plus, I’ve been staying with Sean a lot of the days and that definitely helps save time on the morning commute.
7.) I really hope my parents’ PC is going to be enough to get me through the C# section. It’s a little bit… out-dated, to say the least.
-Yeah, that laptop actually worked great for C#. We’re now on to Ruby and I can use my Mac! Ruby is so clean-looking and I looooovvveeee me some clean code.
ALSO, I officially am going to Ela Conf November 4th and 5th! I’m so excited; it will be a great opportunity to be surrounded by some amazing tech ladies and meet many of the developers who inspire me.
On another side note, apparently there’s a programming language called Rust that I never heard about that I’m oddly intrigued by. I want to learn more about it (Maybe just because it’s got a hipster-sounding name, but hey, I’m allowed to be intrigued).
So much is going on, I’m super busy, and I’m loving every second of it!