This blog will be used as a way to document my journey through Awesome Inc Bootcamp, Spring 2020 class. I hope that by documenting my experiences throughout this process, my failures, successes, insights, and interests will be of use in the future to anyone with passions and an uncontrollable drive down a similar path. Having been a mostly self taught computer user, repairer, and instant internet surfer most of my life, the wealth of documented information on various hardware, software and network problems, and the logic required to solve those problems, is utterly mind boggling, to say the very least. My ability to gain this knowledge when on my own began by reading documentation, but at least 50%, if not more, of this knowledge, progression, and understanding came directly from the people willing to document their failures and the selfless assistance of others in attempting to resolve them publicly. It’s a fascinating thing to watch in real time, as well as benefit from in the future. After ~26 years I can safely say, if I did not contribute in the same manner to the digital world of development publicly as countless multitudes have done on the application surface level as well as in hardware, whose efforts carried me through confusion on so many occasions, I would be dishonoring those before me and doing a disservice to those hereafter. I contributed to these forums in the past, but nearly always anonymously. But I believe that putting a face and a name to a well defined path towards a well defined goal would be much more beneficial to future students.
This week, while reviewing HTML and CSS, I will be adding structure and design to this post.
"Whitespace is like air: it is necessary for design to breathe" --Wojciech Jielinski
As this post is somewhat lengthy and lacking code entirely, I would like you to know, Dear Reader, that the above quote will be respected and and taken quite seriously in the future.
Throughout my digital life I have observed closely the evolution of collaborative philosophies and psychology and have always found the greatest ingenuity and wealth of insight into humanity and how they might best work together to tangibly make the world a better place, to reside online, especially within the developer communities that I’ve watched with awe from a distance, and even within internet forums composed of plain internet and surface level computer users themselves. The digital reaching out from the ether and literally physically affecting the world, often in real time, is a subject whose ultimate significance I think Philosophers of Science and psychologists have barely even begun to scratch the surface of.
Having completed the Intro to Web Dev course recently, I was able to begin a sort of refresher. My first week was not what I expected, both in terms of myself and The Bootcamp, namely my instructors – both exceeding my expectations beyond imagination. In a past life I completed a BS in Biology with a minor in business and proceeded to complete a year of medical school. Upper level electives allowing cross discipline study allowed me to take many courses in psychology and philosophy. The knowledge gained from these courses, and the wisdom from many years in school interacting with extensive varieties of teaching methods and learning styles, I am truly grateful to have found this particular Bootcamp, with these particular instructors. I am excited to see what I can make of myself within this kind of environment. Unlike the entirety of my education before, save a few rare glimpses, I find the teaching, learning, and collaborative philosophies espoused by Justin and Ian to be as wise as I have yet discovered, and their openness, availability, and responsiveness, to thus far be unparalleled in my experience.
The most exciting thing about programming to me at the beginning of my journey has to be the collaborative programming within open source repositories on github. My passion for economics, psychology, philosophy, and technology led me straight to cryptocurrency during my first year of medical school. Being able to understand the technological aspects and how such technology stood to revolution many industries allowed me to bridge the gap between developers and the rest of the world, to kind of play a role akin to that of a science journalist as well as a highly vocal activist/advocate. I have participated in a number of crypto communities via various forums, chat applications, and github repositories over the last decade. My interaction with github was only with social, awareness, and education like campaigns that were discussed, planned and documented there. Every now and then I’d find myself having a peak into the codebase, reading comments and attempting to understand a foreign, perhaps even alien, language at times. I was immediately in awe of how git and github allowed such efficient collaborative effort, and how you could watch multiple people all over the world create, discuss, and review and accept each other’s genius and effort into the whole.
I have always heard, “If a human can make it, a human can break it.” Bugs in software being an ever present danger, either due to the application code itself, or updates in operating systems etc that may render the code of that application broken in the future, is something I have always found fascinating. How these thousands and thousands of lines of code were ever able to be reviewed well enough for anything to ever work at all, is just astounding. Understanding how git and github work, as well as how people use it and use it together, was a serious, “A-HA! Moment for me.” Industries all across the international market would do well to pay closer attention to the software and technological development world’s methods and practice. As always, those outside this domain always tend to lag behind. But there will come a day when teams in many industries will recognize and adopt such, and I’m terribly excited to see what kind of innovation and progress humanity is truly capable of.