Let’s Start At the Very Beginning…

“You don’t have to be great to start, but you have to start to be great.”
-Zig Ziglar

Let’s get her going.

I don’t have any developer friends (that’s not true, but I’m sleeping with the one developer friend I do have and this is not a conversation I want to get into with him), so I’m going to become best friends with, very appropriately, Google.

There are TONS of free options for beginner Computer Science classes online, but I needed one that got down to BASICS. I have an issue where when I start to learn something, I need to know everything so we better be diving into how the energy from a power outlet ends up making letters on my computer screen.

Luckily, I found edX. These are lectures from Ivy league schools, and not just on Computer Science, but on Art History and English. But we are here to learn how to code, so I’m opting for the cs50 course. Completely free, Harvard, and the instructor is nerdy hot like your high school friend’s dad that works in accounting.

At the same time, I’m also utilizing apps like “Grasshopper” (Javascript), “Py” (Python), “Swift Playgrounds” (Swift), and “SoloLearn” (HTML). Some might say taking on so many languages at once is a bad idea, and to that I say…

almost definitely.

I’m Kate. I’m Twenty Five. I’ve spent the last ten years of my life neck deep in the Musical Theatre world. I worked on a cruise ship for two years, traipsing around Europe, singing what felt like exclusively Fly Me to the Moon and dancing around in ballgowns. It was a sweet gig. I also performed at the theme parks in Orlando, Florida doing vocal pyrotechnics or carrying a giant frog that sang bass notes. My MT path brought me to the coolest city in the world, New York, and I moved into a closet sized sublet with high hopes of doing what I love for the years to come.

And then a month in I didn’t love it anymore. It had nothing to do with success. It had very little to do with competition. It had everything to do with the way the business made me feel. I didn’t believe in the work anymore and the need to perform didn’t outweigh the struggle. And the left side of my brain was suffering. I missed learning and studying and understanding. It was a FULL ON quarter life crisis. And it is still going.

What’s amazing about dedicating your life to something for ten years is the expertise and the on the job experience you develop. What sucks about the thing being theatre is the absolute nothing that those skills translate to. So I started taking stock and figuring out what I’d be comfortable starting at square one with. I know some Photoshop basics, I’m interested in marketing, I like photography. But I don’t have SKILLS in anything.

Then I started sleeping with a computer programmer (not how I wish this story started) who informed me that “Anyone can code”. I’d heard it before and always thought “Yeah but not me. I’m not smart enough. I’m not good at math. STEM was not my home.” But I let him explain some basics to me (because it’s cute to listen to people talk about things they like, and I thought then he’d be more inclined to keep having sex with me and buying me dinner) and all of a sudden I was looking more into it.

January 2nd 2020 I decided I wanted to be a front end developer and I knew it was going to be the hardest thing I’ve ever done and it was going to completely change the way I thought about myself. And I realized I needed to do it more than I’ve ever needed to do anything. It might take two years or three years or four years, but it’s got to happen now because I put it on the internet. So here I am. Completely clueless and vulnerable trying to prove not only that “Anyone can code” but that anyone can do anything if they try.

doeADear

Let’s Start At the Very Beginning…

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