Well, so much for getting caught up, eh? It’s been many months since I’ve posted here and A LOT has happened. Just for a brief overview:

• I completed both Rails projects
• I completed the Ruby Gem project
• I completed my Specialization projects
• I’ve learned about Data Structures, Algorithms, Complexity, and other CS subjects
• I’ve learned about SQL
• I built my own ORM-lite in Ruby
• I published my first Open Source project to NPM

And that’s just what I’ve been doing in Bloc; not even mentioning what’s been going on in my real life (my son is 15 months old and turned into quite the troublemaker). So needless to say, it’s been a busy few months. But the transformation I’ve made is unbelievable.

When I wrote my last post I think I was still working on my capstone project, Retrocade, and was in a pretty awkward place in development. I had finally gotten a little confidence on learning new technologies (since I had to learn React, Node, Express, Mongo, ES6 and Canvas on my own), but still some of the behind the scenes stuff was not apparent to me, yet. So I began on the next section of the Bloc curriculum - data structures. I began learning about Stacks, Queues, Linked Lists, Hashes, Trees, Graphs, and Heaps; then I started learning search and sort algorithms and about complexity… all over the course of a few weeks. By the end of it, my mind was reeling. All that confidence I had gained in creating Retrocade had completely evaporated. I didn’t know a damn thing…

But that’s ok. Eventually you digest it. The more I’ve coded; the more I’ve looked at other projects, it all starts to come together. The pieces all slowly start fitting together and you begin to understand. I’m certainly not cocky enough to claim that I’ve masted it all (not even remotely close), but I am starting to understand. I am learning how to see the wheels turning behind the magic of frameworks and even programming languages themselves. And as I sit here writing this, thinking about what Open Source project to contribute to next, I realize that while my journey with Bloc is quickly coming to an end, my journey into programming is only just beginning….