6 months of incremental steps so tiny, that most of the time it doesn’t feel like I’m moving. Only until I look back do I realize I’ve made any progress at all.
There are many days, maybe all days, that I feel like a total and complete moron. I am a native English speaker, but I have no idea what every third word means. Terms like encapsulation, object oriented, and refactoring send me scurrying to Google to try and figure out what they mean. Most of the time the definition leaves me more in the dark than when I started.
Me vs. My Brain
I feel like I’ve suited up for battle. Me against my brain, and I must win. I must stuff this new knowledge into a well worn brain that may or may not cooperate.
I have no choice but to overcome the boredom, which is quickly followed by excitement when a breakthrough happens, only to be followed again by days of boredom reading about hashes, arrays, and the mantra of keeping my code D.R.Y.
Coffee helps, but when it gets really bad I break out an old prescription of Ritalin, which helps even more.
I tell myself to celebrate each and every win. And I do. When 2 X 2 actually does equal 4, I scream at the walls and pump my fist like I’ve hit the scratch and win. I do this because more often than not, 2 X 2 does not equal 4. A lot of times it equals 2, or throws a nasty looking error 15 lines long.
But these are all learning opportunities. Who knew you couldn’t multiply a string times an integer, or that numbers aren’t just numbers but are floats and integers.
Pure Joy
Sitting right beside all this pain and agony is pure joy. Joy when I get a blackjack game going that thoroughly impresses my 9 year old. Or when I put together a basic website that looks like it came from 1995.
I scream when a button I push, does what I pushed button is supposed to do, and sends me fist pumping down the stairs. Maybe this IS going to be worth it?
In a fit of over confidence I decide that maybe I can create this app, I think I can, I think I can.
So as usual, I begin to read. I know Amazon has some way of getting data, and I realize Shopify has a way of receiving data from Amazon, but how can I connect the two? Maybe emails, text messages, smoke signals? No idea..
But I read some more and I realize that I need to hook into Amazon’s MWS API. Yep Google to the rescue, “What is an API”. Google tells me all sorts of mumbo jumbo, but I figure that one out.
Okay, next.. XML, JSON or CSV.. Shit, where did I put my Ritalin?
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