Leta learns to code

Figuring things out like

IT’S THE LAST WEEK.

I know all my posts this mod have just been me saying, “Sorry! I’ve been busy! Here are a few cryptic bullet points trying to explain what I’ve been doing!”

Well, here’s MORE OF THE SAME.

In the weeks since I last posted, I’ve:

Finished building that API for my personal project

Learned about web sockets and real-time apps

Learned about service workers and progressive web apps

Contributed to an open source project (That’s a big deal because it’s a mark of being a “real” dev and embracing the ideals of open source; ie “If we all work together we can make cool shit”)

Completed yet another static comp design challenge

Started our final capstone project (working with Spencer!!! and John!!!) building an app to connect Turing students with mentors

Completed our 10 hour coding challenge final assessment and built a fake ecommerce site including - A database - A server - Custom API endpoints to talk to the database - A front-end

And the biggest piece of news is: I got a job working at Turing as a teach assistant!

This doesn’t sound very good, but since I’ll be making double what I was making at the museum, and since I’ll get to teach (which I enjoy), and since I’ll get to work with a ton of rad humans, and since I’ll have time to polish my portfolio and work on cool personal projects and be a bit more selective in my job search .... I’m pretty stoked about it.

The rest of the school week looks like:

Finish the capstone

Maybe present it at demo night?

Graduate

Introduce myself to my future class

Trying to look like this:

Feeling more like this:

Sorry for the radio silence!

Let me catch you up:

We had two weeks off before Mod 4 and it was glorious

I started Mod 4

I won the Demo Competition with my Mod 3 personal project

The second and third place spots went to my cohort-mates Laura and Devon. 1701 bringing the heat!

I’ve applied for a few jobs.

I learned how to build a backend

I finally got to work with my friend John (for the first time in all 4 mods!)

I’m working on building an API to use in my Mod 3 personal project

In short: I’m POOPED.

I SUPER wish that Turing had a class on accepting positive feedback. We talk a lot about giving and receiving criticism. I’m not very good at that either, but I at least know what shape my face is supposed to be making when I receive it.

On the other hand, I have NO IDEA HOW TO BEHAVE when people sincerely praise me.

I’m the cat in this scenario:

I generally smile and go for a heartfelt “Thank you.” I don’t want to be rude and I am appreciative - it’s just that my organs are simultaneously being sandblasted with a fiery cocktail of embarrassment and giddiness and chagrin and validation and awkwardness and pride and a loud buzzing noise that goes “COMPLIMENT DOES NOT COMPUTE, ALSO YOUR FACE IS HUGE AND OBVIOUS AND NOT FULLY UNDER YOUR CONSCIOUS CONTROL AND PEOPLE ARE LOOKING AT YOUR HUGE, OUT-OF-CONTROL FACE RIGHT NOW”.

I can’t deal.

I knew the last week of Mod 3 was going to be good, because I crushed my final project and knew the eval would go well. I was excited to show it off at demo night, too. It’s the kind of app I hope to make professionally: it fills a need in the world and will hopefully improve peoples’ lives. It was the first school project I’ve had so far at Turing that made me feel like a dev, not just a student.

My classmates practiced our demos together on Thursday, and like pretty much all my stories about the cohort, it was a great bonding experience. Demo night was fun. My class DOMINATED the evening.

My portfolio review was with all three instructors (Taylor, Meeka, and Jhun), and it was overwhelmingly positive. I pretty much always think that I’m middle-of-the-pack at school, which is a good, refreshing feeling. My previous academic experiences were all easy: not much of a challenge, not a struggle. Turing, by contrast, is nothing BUT a challenge and a struggle. I always feel like I’m lagging behind everyone else, only getting a concept after someone explains it to me clearly, never having those lightning flashes of insight. I spend a lot of time at Turing feeling average. This is not fishing for compliments; it’s gratifying to be learning things that don’t come easily to me.

But apparently that understanding of myself is only true inside my head. My portfolio review was so positive as to leave me feeling imposter syndrome for the first time since I started Turing. People talk about feeling like an imposter when things are going poorly, when they aren’t getting a concept, when they’re feeling the struggle. But I feel it now, when I’m being told I’m doing great - my brain immediately goes, “Uh oh, they must be conflating my general affability with technical talent, wah wah, I’m a fraud, quick - deflect! deflect!”

Intellectually I know that’s stupid. Intellectually, I know that I’m doing well and am probably turning out work that isn’t 100% a garbage fire. Intellectually I want people to just receive compliments graciously. But this week I’ve had to confront my inner monologue’s stupidity a lot.

Mod 4 is looking like it’s going to be nonstop struggle, though - so I’m looking forward to feeling, once again, comfortably average 😂

Intermission has started out fabulously: yesterday was my friend’s birthday party, which was actually a pirate-themed murder mystery/puzzle escape room that SHE WROTE. It was incredible and so much fun!

Tomorrow: a friend is getting married :)

Later this week: shadowing the dev team the museum, seeing Wonder Woman with Laura, going to the DinosaurJS conference with Laura, and another shadowing day.

My website is now live, so I can start actually handing out the business cards I printed a few months ago :)

I can’t believe there’s only one week of Mod 3 left. I’m TIRED.

This has been a tough mod. The last couple weeks, though, we’ve been working on our personal projects. We got to create an app from start to finish.

The one I’m working on is designed to help kids who have difficulty emoting (such as kids on the autism disorder spectrum, or who are developmentally delayed, or who have experienced trauma). The app makes use of an API that lets you submit images of faces, and it analyzes the facial expression for emotions. Creepy? Yes. But I’m using it, in this case, to help kids learn to communicate their emotions more easily.

The instructors have been telling us since Mod 1 that, by the end of Mod 3, we’re technically hireable as junior developers. It’s wild, but I do feel capable. As long as I hired onto a team with good mentorship so I could keep learning.

This weekend: I need to figure out how to use Express to do my API call (so I can use environmental variables to obscure my API key - which is a secret code that you use so the API can keep track of how many times you’ve called it/tried to get info out of it); I need to write up a test suite to test all my components; I’m going to help Hillary make decorations for the upcoming pirate-themed murder mystery party she’s throwing; I need to work on my personal website.

I need to deploy my personal website before June 14, because I’ll be attending a JavaScript conference then, and I’d like to be able to hand out my business cards, which include my domain (which is currently not hooked up to anything).

This has been the fuzziest week of my time at Turing. I ostensibly learned to incorporate Redux (a second framework that works in tandem with React), but it is not sinking in.

This week’s project was a team effort - groups of four of us, instead of just a pair. It was really good, and I’m thankful that Devin and Kelly both seem to have a handle on things. Our commit log definitely reflects this - they both have the highest number of commits, and Justyna and I have very few. Part of that is that I was not able to “drive” (aka type out our code as we all worked on the project together) because my adapter cable stopped working and I couldn’t use the HDMI cable to display on the monitor.

Our evaluation is tomorrow (Monday). After that, we’ll kick off our personal projects. I don’t need Redux for that project, but I’ll use it anyway, just to solidify these concepts for myself.

It was a struggle. Like this corgi, I feel like it was a lot of effort without a lot of forward progression.

The reason for this was a monstrous test suite for our latest project. This project had us working in React again, this time making API calls to the Star Wars database (http://swapi.co/). An API call is basically telling your computer to go, “Hey, Star Wars database, I want this information!” And then the server is like, “Oh, I have this info. Cool, here you go.” And then you can work through that data and display it on the screen.

ps Why Star Wars? 1. It’s fun, and 2. It’s a flipping MASSIVE database, and part of the project was challenging us to work through all that data and clean it so we ended up with a small subset of relevant data.

API calls bring us into the world of asynchronous code. Normally, when you write code, the computer reads it a line at a time (more or less), from top to bottom (more or less). One function runs, completes, and then the next function runs, completes, and then the next, and so on.

That’s usually fine because the computer can rip through all that code so fast that you, looking at the website/app/whatever, don’t even notice - it seems like it’s happening all at once.

But API calls are expensive: they take a long time. What you don’t want is for your user to click a button and then stare at a blank screen that doesn’t appear to be doing anything for any noticeable amount of time (and you’d notice it quickly - we start to wonder if something went wrong in a matter of milliseconds).

So how do you make all those calls without the user noticing a lag?

My partner and I solved that by front-loading all our API calls. We got all of our data when the page loads, and created a cute loading screen for the user to look at until the page was ready to render. It was a gif of BB-8 rolling across Jakku along with the word “loading” - delightful. And that loading page never lasted for longer than two seconds. Doesn’t seem like much, but without that loading graphic, it’d feel like forever.

You can also solve API call lag by wrapping them in a promise - which is specific programming term with a specific meaning which I still don’t fully understand - and letting the rest of your code continue on its way until the promise is resolved. Aka, until you get back the data you were waiting for. That way, the rest of your page can finish loading, and other things can be happening while you’re waiting for that one expensive function to complete.

The API calls and asynchronous code are difficult to test.

To back up here - a testing suite is a set of files full of code that tests your app code (the code that makes up your app). It either 1. double checks that everything works the way you think it works, or 2. tells you how to write your app code. That second option is called Test Driven Development (TDD) - the idea is that you write a test outlining what you WANT your code to eventually do, and then you write code to make that test pass.

Anyway. Our API call resulted in a massive set of data that also required additional API calls - very hard to control, very hard to test. So the solution in this case it to make use of a tool called fetchMock. It’s specifically for testing suites, and let’s you fake an API call. Basically, when your app code tries to run an actual API call, your fetchMock catches it, stops the call, and returns data (that YOU define) back to your app code. Your app code thinks that data is the real response from the server, and happily proceeds with the rest of the functions none the wiser.

We created a bunch of fake data to give our app so we could test everything. The point of giving it fake data is that you can TEST with it. When you know what the data contains, you can predict what your app will do with it.

In this case, if I give my app a bunch of data about Luke Skywalker, I can expect it to display data about Luke Skywalker.

My instructor Meeka came up with the greatest analogy ever to explain using fake data in your test suites:

Random analogy to help grok mocking/spying/stubbing:

So let’s say you have a bunch of people at a party. And you are the police in an unmarked van outside of the party (the Jest test suite).  You are trying to catch a notorious drug kingpen named Natalie - by putting a bunch of spies in the party who are wearing wires to record a time that Notorious Drug Kingpen Natalie makes a drug deal.

In order to put wires on party members (functions in your React component) - you have to actually physically catch those party goers in your van and attach said wire to them. Actually, in this analogy, you kidnap the party goers and replace them with fake party goers wearing a wire.

It’s super easy to catch the people who you were already sending to the party from the unmarked van (the functions you pass into the component as props). You stop them immediately and replace them with spies.

But what if you need to put a wire on people that you don’t know who are ALREADY at the party? That’s way harder.

That represents things like Fetch. Fetch is already ‘at the party’ because it is something you already have hard coded in your component file when you write it in.

A package like Fetch-Mock, in this analogy, would be like if you installed a drone copter in the building and trained it to find a certain party goer and kidnap them.

The code to do that is a little complicated, but you could write it yourself. Like you could have built a drone but someone already did, so you might as well just buy it from Walmart, you know?

This has been the latest episode of ‘Weird Analogies Due to Too Much Coffee’

Also - to stretch this analogy even farther.

Why do you have to sometimes mock functions or other props that you aren’t actually using for the test?

Well, depending on how your code was written, sometimes those things are required for your to Component to work properly.

Like, if you are putting a wire on a spy going into the party - you still have to put pants on that secret operative even if the wire is just attached to their shirt. Cause otherwise people will remark loudly that this party goer has forgotten pants (an error).

I don’t know if that makes sense to you guys, but it cracked me up.

Jack and I wrestled with our test suite and fetchMock for, no exaggeration, about twenty hours, all told. And we had 4 classmates and 2 instructors look at our code and say, “Huh. I don’t know. That should be working.” We actually finished the functionality of our app by Tuesday morning, and spent THE REST OF THE WEEK trying to get our tests passing.

Woof. It turned out, our tests were perfectly fine. The fake data we were giving back to our app while running our tests was the problem. Woof.

However, we ended up getting good scores on our project, and I feel confident that I understand how fetchMock and asynchronous testing work.

Slidin’ into mod 3 like “aw yiss oh wait wait wait okay cool cool cool cool cool” 

It was a good week but also tiring (it’s also ongoing - as I write this, it’s Saturday and I’m at school finishing up a project that’s due on Monday).

Miraculously, Spencer and I have been paired for another project - three for three! We’ve worked together once per mod. Hopefully we’ll work together in Mod 4, too 😂 We make a good team. We start the project, we panic, we fix a dumb tiny syntax error, we get going again, we work on a problem for four hours that turns out hinged on one piece of logic that we missed, repeat. But it’s good.

It’s slightly infuriating but not too bad, since working with Spencer is a lot of fun.

This first project is an exercise in React, which is a framework developed by Facebook. Without going into too much detail, it’s basically a way to create sites that are informed by a potentially-rapidly changing database. Without React, changing what’s visible on a webpage can be slow and cumbersome - React makes it easier. For example, every time you Like someone’s post, that data is being stored somewhere, but you see the Like happen immediately. Facebook was dealing with such huge amounts of data, and with so many changes and updates to that data, that they had to develop a better way to manipulate what’s going on on the page.

I think our project is pretty solid. Looking forward to not thinking about it tomorrow, though.

It’ll be evaluated on Monday morning, and then our next project is assigned on Monday afternoon 😭

We had a session addressing microaggressions, which had the potential to be stupid/inflammatory but was actually very good - mostly because it was not very structured and just let us talk to each other. I’ve been and continue to be very impressed by the radness of the people in my cohort. I was in a group with two classmates whom I appreciate a lot, and with whom I’m comfortable being honest and vulnerable. Our discussion was so so so good - nuanced and empathetic and illuminating.

We also started working on our resumes this week. Turing has been telling us that by the end of Mod 3, we’re technically hireable. This is weird and scary to think about.

Sorry for the radio silence, folks - it’s been a busy two weeks!

First things first: I’m moving on to Mod 3! 🎉 More on this later.

I’ll recap week 11:

Week 11 was ROUGH. We started learning about React (a Javascript framework developed by Facebook which makes it easier and faster to manipulate the DOM - that is, to change and interact with what’s being displayed on the screen) for our project Weathrly. We built basic weather apps using the data provided by Weather Underground. It was a lot to take in. A totally new framework, a new way to understand the DOM, two new testing libraries - Enzyme and Jest, and understanding how to make API calls.

It being the penultimate week of the mod, we were all pretty tired, and taking in that much new info felt like trying to fit just one more sweater into an over-stuffed suitcase. My zippers were feeling strained for sure.

But we survived, and everyone in the mod is moving on!

Week 12:

Assessment week! We had our evaluations on our Weathrly projects, did a one-on-one assessment to go over our skillz and knowhow with array prototypes, ES6 vs plain old ES2015 Javascript, setting context, and scope. Wowza.

Thursday night was the school’s demo night, where students can show off their projects for 4 minutes each. I presented my dumb acrostic generator (see the previous post for details), and only covered about half the info I meant to do because I panicked and basically ran off the stage, lol.

(My cohort collectively uses “lol” to denote desperation and quiet panic, and that it’s fitting because “lol” appropriately looks like a stick figure sinking into quicksand.)

My classmate John also presented the game that he and Justyna made for our first project of the mod. It’s STEEPED in Turing inside jokes, all centered around our instructor Jhun and his SoCal ways. It’s a goddamned work of art. The rest of the student projects (from upper mods) were amazing; Pam from the mod ahead of us created a tone analyzer for Slack using an API from Watson (the super smart computer that won Jeopardy a while back); a group made an app that connects Turing alumni and current students to facilitate the job hunt for graduates; another student made a site that collects info on the groups that provided financial support for Senators and Representatives, alongside how those public servants have voted. Seriously cool projects.

It was great to see people’s work, and to get a hint of what we’ll be working on in the next couple mods.

In my free time this week, I also made a video that explains a Javascript array prototype (.forEach()) using pizza as a metaphor.

I’m so funny, you guys.

lol

(You’re never going to unsee the drowning stick figure, sorry.)

I’m looking forward to a week off, but also looking forward into getting back into the struggle with my cohort. I know I’ve been saying it for a while, but we’ve really gotten close, trust each other, rely on each other, care for each other.

I’ve met some genuinely standup human beings.

I started writing up brief paragraphs about each of them, but that might have to be a post (or series of posts) for later.

Posting late again - this is recapping last week, which was challenging, long, and good.

Out project for the week was building a prefix trie. What is a prefix trie? It’s basically the structure that runs autocompletion.

Did you just type in “piz”? Cool, the prefix trie is going to run through the tree of words and show you, “Hey, these words start with ‘piz’! Pizza, pizzeria, pizzicato! Which one do you want?”

We built all the stuff that runs in the background in order to do all of that - which is a structure that looks like a tree. It’s called a trie - short for “retrieval” - because it arranges linked data in a way that lets you retrieve it easily.

(image isn’t mine)

You can see how, starting at that top circle C, you can trace routes down to complete words (noted by the black circles) - “cat, clue, celery’, etc.

If you typed in “ca” - the algorithms I wrote would run down every branch of the tree and find those black circles, and give back a list: cat, car, card, carry, cart.

This was a tough challenge for the class - it’s all foundational computer science, working deeply with data structures. We worked together to figure it out - how to break up a word into those circles (bits of data called nodes, which include the letter and a pointer that goes to the next letter in the word), how to mark a circle as the end of the word, how to find those end-word circles, how to run down the branch and build up the letters into words to display on screen.

The whole of last week, you could see groups of people clustered around whiteboards, working through the logic, untangling knots, bemoaning inexplicable errors, celebrating wins, explaining breakthroughs to others.

All our code wound up being patchworks - Adam’s idea to break up a function into two pieces, Zane’s slick recursion solution, Kelly’s genius brainwave to utilize an object to connect two pieces of data together so we could reference them outside the function.

It felt weird to present the code as my own, when it was definitely a group effort. But the point of the project was to learn - and I understand tries now.

I turned it into a front-end application. You can try it out if you want - it’s probably buggy and might not work 😭

My eval went well - I feel good about the work I did and my understanding of the concepts. Like the otter above, I feel like I’m running hard to keep up, but achieving moments of smooth sailing, too.

I also turned 30 this week. And, over the weekend, I traveled to Arizona for my grandmother’s funeral.

It was wonderful to see family, including one of my brothers and his fiancee. My mom pulled out a bunch of photo albums which had pictures of my grandma as a kid and teenager, back in the 1920s and ‘30s. I wish I’d seen them sooner - the photos showcase her personality: mischievous, glamorous, with a wry-but-sweet humor, style, a streak of wildness and fun, tempered by good sense. She and her best friend Betty remind me of me and my best friend. She was just ... cool.

A long week. But a good one.

This week was long but really good.

Our project (assigned on Monday, evaluated on Thursday) was reinforcing our understanding of some fundamental concepts: we wrote algorithms that sorted sets of data.

For example, if you had a set of numbers like this: [5, 3, 4, 2, 1], you’d be able to run one of my sorting algorithms on it and it would spit out a sorted set, like this: [1, 2, 3, 4, 5].

We worked on three algorithms to do this - three different methods of sorting things. Why different methods? Because some sorts are better for different types of data than others - in this case, “better” means “faster”. They’ll all get to the same result, but in programming, milliseconds matter.

We were also being evaluated on our ability to write an efficient and comprehensive test suites. Code to automatically test our code, basically.

I have the feeling that next week will be tough - our next project involves manipulating more complex data.

But this week was good. This was a solo project, but we worked together. Everyone struggled, but we struggled together. I leaned on others for help, I helped others when I got the concepts. And I did! I got the concepts!

The challenge was fun. It was a joy to wrestle with it, to make it work, to see how I’m getting better at this. I’m not kidding - I had a blast.

We also had some downtime toward the end of the week. It was so great to just get to chat with each other. At lunch on Thursday, a group of us sat swapping ghost stories and celebrity crush lists for an hour. Stupid and glorious.

Well, Spencer and I managed to get our Snake game working! The snake now does more than run off the screen 😂 

The evaluation went pretty well - we knew our code could be refined but it had been such a struggle to get basic functionality down, so we left it as it was. There was such a large learning curve on this that we were happy to just have a finished, functioning game.

Week 8 felt very long. I spent most of it feeling like the snake in the above gif - just barely keeping it together. “I’m cool, I’m cool. No, no, it’s good, this is fine. I’m fine. It’s fine.”

We’ve been focusing on array prototypes, which are bits of code that let you analyze and manipulate sets of data. Leaving Mod 1, it was my weakest area. I feel like I’m still pretty behind, but I’ve been working on our assigned exercises and am slowly getting a grip.

Next week sees the kickoff of our first solo project since week 1 - but it’s not REALLY solo. We’re all in charge of writing our own code, but it’s expected that we’ll work together to come up with solutions.

I’ve been saying it almost weekly, but it continues to be true - our cohort keeps getting closer knit. Good honesty, good vulnerability, good humor, good support. It’s pretty ideal :)

Oh, this last week was the first time I got to pair with the 1703 crew (they’re in their first module right now). I did three pairing sessions, which is just an informal study session. Usually the focus is someone’s project, but it can also cover topics like reviewing a lesson, talking about adjusting to Turing, whatever.

It was really fun, and cool to see where some of the 1703ers are and how they’re learning. One woman writes the sleekest most beautiful Javascript - it’s amazing! She has such good instincts.

The small group of 1701ers who ended up repeating Mod 1 are doing really well - it’s so awesome to see them totally killing it! And it’s just really great to be able to see them and keep in touch.

Welp, this week was ... complex.

I came in like this penguin - confident, smug - only to find myself flopping, ungainly and resigned, back into the water.

Or at least it feels that way, haha.

The Mod 2 instructors, Jhun and Nathaniel, are great. Thorough, funny, flexible educators - Jhun in particular is good at interpreting our silences as “wtf?”s, and will work to demystify a concept even further.

He also is from southern California and frequently follows up a student breakthrough with a celebratory “It’s liiit!” and greets the class with an unironic “suh dude”. I am constantly reminded of the turtle from Finding Nemo.

Nathaniel is from The South and has a magnificent curly mustache and coiffed beard. He put some lyrics from a Ray LaMontagne song in one of the lecture slides. He would not be out of place in a modern folk-rock band.

Lessons in Mod 2 are weird - I KNOW that I’m getting stuff. I’ve been experiencing that weird sensation of feeling your brain making new connections. However, those connections feel tenuous and superficial, liable to fade away or link together erroneous information.

But I think it’ll sink in with time. Despite feeling uncertain, I haven’t been too stressed yet. I’m trusting the process.

For our first project this mod, I’m paired up with Spencer (we worked on a project together last mod, and that went really well). We’re attempting to build a simple snake game from scratch, and so far our game does this:

And nothing else, haha. So far, at least!

I had a great meeting with my mentor (a Turing grad from the backend program who now works as a front end engineer). I like the  Mod 2 instructors. My cohort continues to build strong connections with each other.

Week six was the last week of Mod 1. It’s also called the Pentathlon - five separate assessments that determine whether or not we’re continuing to Mod 2, or repeating Mod 1.

Two of the assessments were live coding challenges, where we were given a task to complete in thirty-ish minutes. The first one gauged our ability to use jQuery or Javascript to build functionality into a page. The second challenge tested our skills in unit testing and using array prototypes.

The third assessment of the Pentathlon was a quiz that went over our understanding of pretty much all the terms we’ve learned so far.

The fourth part was a static comp challenge, where we were given a static image of a website, and were tasked with reproducing it as a responsive website (responsive means that it dynamically rearranges itself as the screen size changes - creating a “mobile” version, basically).

The last portion was putting together a portfolio of all our projects from this mod, and sitting down one-on-one with an instructor to talk about how things went, where we are, what we’ll need to work on before the next mod starts.

I passed my assessments, crushed my static comp challenge, and had a really great talk with my instructor, Bree. She did say that she and the other instructors considered keeping me in Mod 1. “Not,” she added, “because of your skills. Just because we don’t want you to not be in our classes anymore.”

I heart-eyes-ed pretty hard. I really enjoy the instructors, so it was really gratifying to find out that my nerdy enthusiasm in class was appreciated.

Some of my classmates are repeating Mod 1 - which makes me both sad and proud. Sad, because I legitimately love my cohort - it’s a diverse group of people but I think we’ve come together as a class really well. There’s a lot of trust and encouragement and celebrating one another’s successes. I’m sad to not be seeing as much of some really rad humans. And I’m proud, because it’s super brave to honestly assess where you are and to be like, “I am going to strengthen my foundations.” I am not good at admitting weaknesses in myself, and it always impresses the hell out of me when other people can.

Our instructors for the next module (Jhun and Nathaniel) came and talked to us on Friday to prepare us for what to expect in Mod 2. I am terrified and excited at the same time. It’s going to be a lot of work.

But for now, it’s intermission week. Becky is visiting me from Chicago! I’m planning to enjoy myself, relax, and dive into the prework for Mod 2 because I am a Hermione who loves to get a head start on homework.

This morning, I went to school early to catch a talk, hosted by the Joan Clarke Society (Turing’s student group for people who identify as women) about negotiating salary and raises. It was great! So informative.

I had been debating going, though - because today is also my eighth anniversary with Nick, and I had been kicking around the idea of making and eating breakfast together.

That didn’t ultimately materialize (mostly because I don’t like waking up early, partly because I don’t like most breakfast foods, and partly because learning to negotiate my salary seemed important enough to not miss). But I’ve been thinking about how this morning’s talk and the fact that I’m able to do this program are all related, all based on the idea that women are no less capable or skilled than men.

Nick has been telling me since before I started at Turing that he’s so excited for me to add something else to the pile of “things Leta is really good at that Nick doesn’t understand at all”. He has always been encouraging and enthusiastic, celebrating my successes in school while reminding me that, though exciting, they’re not surprising (because he has a rosy estimation of my skills, haha).

He’s taking on the brunt of our living expenses, because he believes in my abilities, because he’s happy that I’m doing something I enjoy, that I find challenging, that will lead to a career that I’ll (hopefully) love. None of his sacrifice is freighted with expectation - it’s not a favor to be held over me, not a loan to be repaid. He’s confident I’ll be successful, but that confidence is not a pressuring force.

We’ve been together for eight years today. I’m just as unable to articulate how lucky I feel now as I was in college when we started dating. I just know that I feel so thankful to be with someone who believes in my strengths, helps me shore up my weaknesses, and who can gracefully wear all the hats we have to wear in relationships: sidekick, teacher, student, cheerleader, therapist, partner, best friend.  I can’t wait for the next eight years (and, yes, next year I’ll say the next nine years, and the year after that will be the next ten years, and the year after that ... )

There is no escape :)

This was the last week of instruction before next week’s evaluations.

After a month of steady inclining, it was kind of nice to have a relative plateau; this week was about reviewing and strengthening skills more than piling on new ones. We had a new project this week, but it was about refining existing code, rather than writing and implementing new concepts.

It feels like our instructors are being a bit gentle with us this week.

Frankly, I’m relieved, because it gives me time to study before the Pentathlon. I need to polish up my jQuery and DOM traversal skills, and I’d like to get more comfortable with constructor functions and array prototypes.

It’s really weird to look back and remember that just over a month ago, I had NO IDEA how to do any of this.

Just last night, Nick and I had people over to our place for board games, and my friend Brad (who is a full-stack developer) and I were chatting about styling a data table and discussing accessibility. Nick later said he wished he could have recorded the conversation and played it back to a-month-ago-Leta.

I’m feeling pretty good going into next week. I have a studying plan for the weekend, and I’ve accessed that eye-of-the-tornado space where I can tell myself “whatever happens, happens” and like 95% believe it.