In the marathon that is Flatiron’s Coding Bootcamp, Rails has proven to be my Wall – that point at mile 15 or 17 or 20 where your mind and body seem to give out and the goal appears unreachable.
In part that’s just a function of scale; Rails is a complete and multifaceted framework for web design, and as such the sheer volume of information you’re trying to ingest quickly overwhelms the capacity of the woefully underpowered processor we call a brain. Then there’s the level of abstraction – all that “magic code” that makes routine tasks a breeze but obscures levels of complexity that seem bottomless once you scratch beneath the surface.
What was most distressing about the process was not just how quickly I’d seem to forget earlier lessons as I forged onto new ones – each fresh download of information apparently requiring a complete memory wipe – but how I’d also seemingly lost the knowledge of everything I”d learned up to that point. Basic, fundamental details like the difference between = and == were suddenly nowhere to be found in my hollowed-out skull. Four months and several thousand dollars in, the whole project of learning to code was starting to feel like a very big and costly mistake.
It turned out fine, of course. There’s a reason people don’t become seasoned programmers in four months, and the reason is: there’s a lot to learn. The hurdle for me turned out to be not my own capacity for learning but the speed at which I was trying to do it. If you want to learn something well, you have to learn it thoroughly. And learning thoroughly means learning slowly.