There are varying degrees of challenges that come for your during your time walking this mortal coil. Sometimes they are forced upon you and other times you take them upon yourself. The important thing I try to remind myself is no matter what the challenge, working your way through it usually has me feeling like I have grown as a person and came out better for it on the other side. After a great 13 years with the only company I have ever worked for, my next big challenge has begun and I guess the only thing I want to say is,

console.log("hello world!)"

The decision to quit a steady career and start from the beginning and learn software engineering was not a quick or easy one. The pace at which technology has evolved since I was a kid has been nothing short of break neck and while I wouldn't consider myself a "technologically challenged"; I was content to read the one thousand mile view of the advancements, enjoy the ease of using the new products and never really dive into the weeds of how those advancements came about. After some soul searching about what I wanted from the second half of my career and life to look like, taking something that was a passing interest of mine and making the leap to learn as much as I could just felt right; so here I am, a student at Flatiron School learning software engineering at their bootcamp. I am sure everyone's journey to learning is different but I thought this would be a good opportunity to share some brief insights into my mind as I began. Hopefully it helps anyone reading who felt the same kind of panic I did, realize they aren't alone.

You can do the pre-reading and all the research you want, but for me nothing prepared me for the first time I opened my terminal and realized it was up to me to set up the directories I would be using, connect it with my newly created GitHub account and open up Visual Studio Code to start working on my lab assignments. The first time I forked a repository and then cloned it to my computer (git clone git@github:dillybunn/....) I must have read the instructions a hundred times and I still doubted I was doing it right. If you ask me to compare how I felt at that moment; to some later labs, where I was actually writing code like:

function isPalindrome(word) {
  const reversedWord = word.split("").reverse().join("");
  return word === reversedWord;

I would have told you while the latter was much more difficult to figure out, the former was definitely more nerve wracking for someone with no experience coming into the program. Repetition is key and while I still deal with self doubt, I can confidently state I feel good about navigating the terminal and pushing things to GitHub. A bit of advice from a newbie though; don't forget the three main commands git add ., git commit -m "note", git push.

It is easy to feel overwhelmed when starting something new and default to not pushing yourself outside your comfort zone. But if it helps here is something I wrote. It is my first code with no prompts, no labs; just what I have learned so far that I would like to share. I am sure in the days/weeks/months/years to come, I will look back and laugh at it, but the message is something I will continue to live by and I hope it helps you to.

const name = "Billy"

const relax = "Take a deep breath";

const combineAdvice = (advice) => {
  return `${name}, ${relax} ${advice}`;
};

console.log(combineAdvice("and enjoy the ride."));