Everybody is a genius. But, if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it’s stupid.- Albert Einstein

I didn’t learn to code because I spent my childhood tearing apart electronics and putting them back together. I didn’t learn to code because I love computers. I didn’t play a ton of video games growing up, I wasn’t particularly stellar at math, and I don’t need a job that pays well fast (although… it would be nice). I really don’t fit into the stereotypical coding mold. Learning code for me was out of necessity. I had a vision for a website that I wanted to build, and instead of finding someone to make it for me or sitting around and thinking about it, I learned to make it myself.

Now, not many people like me do that. Not because it’s hard, or because people don’t believe in their own ideas, but because the full love and appreciation of tech is a hard fought battle. When I first started Epicodus, a 6 month 40hr/week bootcamp for learning computer programming, I was resigned to the fact that I’d hate programming. I had grown up around a remarkably intelligent family, of which my Father taught himself to code in his spare time, and I was always intimidated by the complexity of what it entailed to learn it. I had prodded him a few times to show me basics, just to end up with a headache and strong distaste for seemingly boring lines of brackets and text. It didn’t really seem like my thing. And because of this, not so long ago I had convinced myself that I had to force myself to learn the concepts of coding, even if I really sucked at them, just to try bring my idea to life. A few months of coding couldn’t be that bad, could it? (famous last words…)

What I found, is something that I never would have expected. I liked it. Mostly, I liked how I was applying something practical to my idea. The ability to directly apply the concepts I learned, to a tangible working MVP (minimum viable product) of my site, was as close to a perfect job as I could pretty much ever get. Web development and design open a world of opportunity into exploration of new ideas surrounding customer engagement and feedback, branding and marketing of a product or service, client based reactive programming, data storage and manipulation, user social connectivity, and more. All things that are directly applicable to the concept I had in mind. The start-up enthusiast, the businessman, and the techie in me had it all.

But not without hardship. One thing that coding brings, is a lot of tired eyes, bugs, headaches, and coffee. All the best development practices in the world can’t save a coder from bugs, and I was no exception. My fellow dev’s know, there are no better friends or worse enemies than commas, brackets, and semi-colons. Thank god for linters. From the 5 hour, “I think I’m about to go all Office Space on this computer monitor”, to waking up in bed at 4am and sitting up to yell, “I figured it out!!”, we all go through our trials and tribulations. It’s what makes the end result of a good site, game, or to-do list (just kidding!) so much sweeter.

Here I am now, at the end of the classes, with a working, albeit unfinished, version of my idea. I will not finish my learning of software development, in fact, I just started. My first glimpse of the working tech world, in the form of an internship at a startup here in Portland called Zeppidy, brings me to the realization that what I learned in bootcamp is just the very tip of the iceberg. Already, in a week, we are mastering cutting edge tech like IBM’s loopback API node.js framework and the Polymer-Project web-component front-end platform. My head hurts just talking about it, but I’ve never learned more quickly in my life.

What I have found, or rather confirmed, is that the father of invention is necessity. The difference here is that the need was one to fulfill my own goals, dreams, and ideas. By making the choice to stop everything to learn to code and start my website, I found out where I’d flourish and where I’d fail. Maybe, where I was before, I was just a fish trying to climb a tree.