Last you heard from me I was a terrified brand new student diving into the world of Software Engineering. Since then, I’ve become a slightly less terrified, semi-new student diving into the world of Software Engineering. It’s both exciting and frustrating. However all the frustration has led to breakthroughs I never thought someone like me would be capable of. This wasn’t at all my world coming from the hospitality industry. I never thought I’d be able to look at a blank terminal and be able to create a readable code, let alone an entire mini app.
Engineering software and coding takes an insane amount of patience. I’ve learned how to build methods, create variables and classes. I’ve learned how to make those classes interact with one another. The biggest thing for me was understanding exactly what an instance was. Sounds pretty simple, and it is. Coding has a weird way of making your brain want to overthink and complicate things. I had to force myself to trust that my first gut answer is probably as simple as it sounds. It gets complicated once you start to code all these new concepts together, but the brightest lightbulb went off when the small concept clicked.
No pun intended here but for instance, there are two types of methods. There are class methods, and instance methods. Methods can be called to give behavior and attributes to objects. A huge concept is that understanding that self in a class method refers to the class, and self in an instance method refers to the instance. Again, if it sounds simple, it’s because it truly is. Your mind will play tricks on you, though to make you think it’s more complicated than that. Also, my cohort lead uses the example of methods being like kitchen appliances. That actually really helped everything click for me. A blender can blend things, but not if it’s never turned on. It was rough to remember to call methods in my code for me. Once it was explained that way though, I now look at my terminal like a kitchen, and all my new classes are appliances. I don’t think I will ever be able to see it any other way, but hey whatever works!
Overall, everything is still quite overwhelming, and I feel like a toddler who understands concepts but can’t spit out quite what I want to say and have it make sense to the adults. In this case the adult being my computer. However, what makes it less intimidating is taking more time to really understand and correlate new concepts in code to real life situations. Pseudocode, or typing out in human english first, is an actual lifesaver. Coding is overwhelming, but for me is becoming something I can see a faint light of at the end of the tunnel, and that is all the motivation necessary to keep pushing myself to learn more.
