Start of something new

With Wednesday, Metis' career day behind us, we're finished with the course - but there's tons of resources we still have access to. However, we're now fully-fledged junior developers at this point.

It's been an incredible ride; and while I've said that several times throughout the blog, it still hasn't changed one bit. I've learned a lot, and we've been taught much. At the start, I only had what I gathered from my experiences in RMXP and video game modding, and now I can make full fledged web apps, the design principles to make them be powerful, flexible and lean, the various languages and tools to build them on and the drive and resources to move on.

It's wonderous what 3 months can achieve, and I really have gotten used to the idea of how what I have now is able to create things to help people with. I can express my creativity and my desire to help others or myself through what I've learned.

Creative writing is one of my favourite pastimes, and in that regard, I've found that coding isn't too different from it. In a sense, we are creating things - we are building something as a sort of creative need within us as builders. There's many ways to tell a story, or to paint a picture, or to write code that all convey or do the same thing. The processes that we go through and the challenges we face are all very similar to one another. We have to figure out how to overcome the hurdles of burn out, how to motivate ourselves, or those moments where we feel like we can't come up with anything valuable or something people would want, or times where we think we're weaker than our peers.

In that regard, coding requires the same dedication or passion as writing. I think that's why I've fallen in love with this particular art. While creative writing will be a pastime for me, I feel that it serves me best as my tool of self expression and introspection. Code, on the other hand, is my way to really create things for others. I have a lot of projects lined up that I think of daily as I ponder about family, friends and colleagues that could use my talents to make a few of their problems easier.

Definitely, now that I walk out of thoughtbot's office as a Metis graduate, I feel like I can code a lot more challenging apps, and these challenges are things I'd be glad to tackle.