And all of a sudden, I went from treating my code as delicate and afraid to mess it up to ripping entire pieces off to see what would happen.

I had been stuck on this checkpoint in my coding bootcamp…

Where I left off in my last post was that I had spent time trying to figure it out myself, finally went to my mentor but he couldn't figure it out either so he had another mentor look at it and still nothing. Finally my mentor was taking it to the “team leader”.

Well he couldn't make sense of why I was getting this error either, it seemed like some odd fluke. Since I was at the beginning of the project my mentor and I decided I would just start over.

So I started over and everything worked perfectly. Of course that's not what happened. When I got to the same point I was at before, I got the same damn error!

I was pissed but not in the same way as before. When you get stuck as a student/beginner you're not sure where to go next and have no experience in how to fix it but you have places to turn to for help . That kind of felt like a helpless frustration, which was even more frustrating. But at this point there was no guarantee in getting an answer from anyone else, so it was more of a determined pissed than a helpless frustration.

I turned that anger into action and all of a sudden, I went from treating my code as delicate and being afraid to mess it up to ripping entire pieces off to see what would happen. Finally I ripped off the right piece and the error went away, of course the project wasn't working like it should so I just started adding pieces back until I had it working with no error. I felt like God.

Ok, maybe that's a bit dramatic but I did feel amazing. I felt confident. I have resources I can turn to for help but now I also know how to dig deeper, research an error, take things apart and put them back together until they work. That feels good.