Reflecting on my time at General Assembly's Web Development Immersive Program

My time at General Assembly's 12 week immersive web development program has me still somewhat baffled...at the amount of knowledge now swimming in my head. I still remember week one where we struggled with the fundamentals and the terminal, making calculator apps with puts this and print that.

Eventually fighting our way to the magic of Rails and beyond relentlessly ever onwards. I would always get a voice of doubt in the back of mind, demoralizing me whenever I was stuck and looping over problems again and again, "What are you even doing here mate," and "You're just not cut out for this sort of thing, just quit". I'm grateful I received so much encouragement from my peers and instructors rallying the Forces of Assurance & Perserverance within me to battle to the end. I knew I had to do this, I'd burnt all my boats and I was going to do it.

So here we are now, finally glad that picture of those green grassy fields of code-nirvana in my mind are reality, at the end of it all. Actually that's a lie. With every step we took through the program, it was only ever more apparent that my little victories however uplifting at the time were then followed by the realization that there was this whole other thing I didn't know about - which I then went to read up on. Then would follow the next little victory after learning that new little thing. Then another void of knowledge. And so we continue our lives just as we always have. Well I gradually got used to this pattern, and now find myself enjoying the momentary urge to devour whatever information was needed to fill that hole in my knowledge to get that one thing to do this thing that I want that other thing to do. So many things.

And so little time, was something else I learnt. There is a vast span of knowledge out there for most things we needed to do, and it was only a matter of time which I also learnt - in setting realistic goals for my projects for using something in which I thought I'd have somewhat of a confident grasp of. I have this crippling fear of trying something I didn't know out for the first few frightening times and being expected to produce a tangible result of that experiment. Which led me to use the technologies I used on the projects that I worked on during my time in WDI. I didn't want to be irresponsible and make something with more horrid code than it already probably was with something I was even less familiar with ( hence my second crippling fear - BACKBONE - but hopefully we'll sort that fella' out soon ).

That sums up my little monologue/ rant/ thoughts on the Web Development Immersive program at General Assembly. It was pretty awesome and I loved every bit of it - even testing.