TO INFINITY, AND BEYOND

As I sit in my comfy desk chair, the one which I've basically been glued to for the past 16 weeks or so, it has suddenly become incredibly surreal that this is the last day of Ronin Cohort 2. Sure, last week was graduation, but I remember thinking to myself, "Well, I still have hiring week."

This week we Ronins self-governed our daily standups, which was actually much easier than I would have thought. I've come to think of us as some kind of awkward 5-legged creature that has somehow learned to function as one coordinated unit.

It's weird to think that next Monday we might not all be getting together, at least not for a normal standup. This week our Slack channel was eerily quiet as everyone scurried away at times to go work on their CVs, beef up their READMEs and polish off unfinished projects.

Ironically, I've probably made more commits to GitHub this week than any other. And while there have been many times when I've doubted myself throughout this course, this week I feel like a new person. Maybe the first time I apply for a job I won't get it. Maybe not even the second or the third. But for the first time in a while my own insecurities aren't getting to me. For the first time in a while I feel in control and the roaring, negative static that once occupied my mind has diminished to a cowardly whimper.

This week when I forced myself to confront old projects, there were problems to solve like always. There were times when I wanted to grab the nearest object and have it jettisoned out the window via makeshift catapult. In fact, most of the time you can literally decipher my mood at the time of committing by reading my commit messages. They can fall anywhere between informative yet concise to slightly less ambiguous than a passive aggressive breakup text. Some of my favorite types of commit messages:

Tolstoy-inspired commit message: git commit -m "Happy commits are all alike; every unhappy commit is unhappy in its own way. Screw you, Heroku, just accept my generous app offering already."

Dickens-inspired commit message: git commit -m "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. Fixed that one stubborn bug finally, created several more."

The "I can't even" commit message: git commit -m "Did things" "stuff happened" "yeah" "sigh" "this again" "typing" "inconsequential changes"

Why write something actually helpful to readers in the future when you can amuse your borderline hysterical error-crushing self with fun yet useless commit messages? (I am winking at you, reader)

Despite all the frustrations this week, however, not once did I truly feel stupid. I have made the shift from thinking "Why am I so slow?" and "How am I not getting this yet?" to "What is the best way to approach this?" and "Have I ever seen anything like this before?"

Having the strength to get through this program with your head held high is nothing short of being a Jedi knight (or something). There are so many road blocks for you to face and most of them come from within. But the moment you stop thinking about whether you'll make it to the finish line and focus on just putting one foot in front of the other, you have already won.

Fin

(^^ except not really, because more about my post-Makers adventures later)