Being locked up in our homes is trying for all of us. Personally, I don’t cope well with boredom. Since my husband is a 15 year veteran of the software engineering industry, I thought it would be nice to let him teach me how to code. Many years ago, I taught myself html, and later on added css. I couldn’t quite grasp javascript, but the online courses for it really don’t teach, they’re designed to give people who already know javascript certifications.
My husband and I decided that I should start learning with java for several reasons, the most prevalent of which being it is one of the simpler languages to learn and it is very versatile. It can be used across nearly every platform making it one of the most in-demand languages for developers to know. What I didn’t know going into this is that since java has been around so long, it has evolved quite a bit. Well, the language itself has, but a lot of the people using it have not.
My husband told me that it might be helpful to take an online logic for computer engineering course. In computer science, the concept of logic is very complex, and he thought it would be good to take a basic course introducing me to how that logic works. The problem is, if I try to find a course like that, all I get are courses on logic apps. So I tried looking a bit broader and found a blog that started talking about specifics. It talked about understanding data structures and algorithms. So I went searching for those courses. What I found was shocking…courses on how to FAKE an understanding of data structures and algorithms to get through an interview! Yeah, not quite what I was looking for…
Moving on…
Another thing I wasn’t quite prepared for is that my husband is a “sink or swim” teacher. He took a couple of lessons to go over some basics, then gave me a coding assignment. I was lost. I wasn’t supposed to ask him, so after striking out with my notes, I did what any developer would do…I turned to the internet. All I found on the internet was a bunch of garbage designed for old systems. Eventually I had to ask my husband. He wouldn’t tell me what I had done wrong. He kept trying to get me to figure it out. In the end, I finally realized that I had typed my conditional backwards. It probably would have been easier for him to just tell me I had things typed in the wrong order, but now I will never forget how to type a conditional.
I know that I am a terrible student. I am confident that some of the high grades that I got in college were because the professor just wanted to get me out their hair and out of their classroom forever. I am grateful that my husband is taking time that he could be using to play games or do other relaxing things to teach me a useful skill. He thinks that when I get frustrated, I’m giving up. I hope he understands that taking a step back is not giving up. It’s taking a breath to get a new perspective.
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