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I see code differently now.

It's a process.  No matter how 'slowly' you try to learn it.  It is overwhelming. It is a lot.  Even a year into learning code, I still feel overwhelmed.  I still find a CSS positioning weird and my experience thus far has showed me it is weird.  It is confusing.  They'll release all new versions of everything I've learned next year and it will again be confusing.

That's just this industry.  It's an odd conundrum to have a wealth of resources and experience and still feel in a constant state of somewhat just blindly 'going for it' in every project.  And there is progress.  There has been immense progress.  I can talk to coders now and not feel like every other word out of their mouth is jargon.  I get it.  I can speak it now.  I can speak the language.  Somewhat like learning a speaking language, you have this moment where you can understand what others are saying before you can speak it yourself.  That's about where I feel like I am now.  I can talk the lingo, I can understand the frameworks, I can spin you up an app in almost any framework you hand me in 2-7 days.

But this is where you really separate yourself from someone who codes a bit to a Software Engineer.  Can I be handed a complex problem that already has multiple pieces of code written and jump in and solve it?  That's the step.  So far it's been this overwhelming but kind of beautiful meandering stroll through crazy mountains.  And I'd dart up one mountain and say, 'Wow I made it. It might've been a small mountain but I made it!'  And then I'd dart back to the path and keep walking and the mountains just get bigger and bigger.  Small achievements, little side darts, but not feeling on top of the mountain.

I'm getting out of control with the visuals, aren't I?  Basically I feel like I see the monster mountain in front of me.  I didn't even know what it was before. I didn't know what I was missing or what I was headed towards, but I see it now. I get it.

Algorithms.  It all circles back to algorithms.  Because I can dart up any new framework or language all I want and I will always, always feel behind.  Next year all those mountains will fade and new ones will rise and I'll constantly feel like I'm playing catchup.  But if I can master problem-solving; if I can be approached with a massive set of code, a set of functions and use those to solve a company's problem.  It wouldn't matter what the language was, it wouldn't matter the framework, it wouldn't matter if I didn't know the code they had written.  I could look at it, analyze the problem, analyze the code from a analytical standpoint and I would always come out ahead.  I'd no longer feel like I'm playing catchup.

That would be the glory moment for me.  That's my mountain.  Becoming an expert problem-solver.  And the process is a special one.  Not only in coding, but in life.  How can I break this problem down?  Are there manageable bite-size pieces?  Can I split those up and solve them individually?  If I put them back together would I have a solution? Let's try that solution.  Let's re-iterate it.  Let's toss weird stuff at it and see if it's still a solution.

At that point, we can throw in the semi-colons and parentheses and we have it.  Languages are brackets.  They're not the heart.  I see the heart of coding now.  I get it.  Well.. I don't, but I get what I need to head toward to get it.

I feel like the last year has been about scrambling up mountains trying to keep ahead of the newest tech.  And it was fun. And I learned a lot.  I can talk the talk now.  I have an understanding.  But this year is about the long haul.  This year's about the big mountain.  This year's looking at what is holding up the entire path holding all the frameworks and languages in the first place.  How am I even able to walk on JavaScript or Ruby? What's holding it up? What's behind it all?

That's my goal.  I see it differently now.

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