GETTING SWIFT-Y

Oct 24, 2015
2 min read

Hey all! First, I'm going to preface this post by saying thank you to everyone who has supported me so far, or read my posts -- I won the Makers Academy blogging competition for the July 2015 cohort! WOO!!! I have to say, that was definitely amazing news, but honestly writing this blog has helped me so much more than I could have imagined. It has been a great place to talk about some of the many many concepts I have learned, spill my emotions out onto the virtual page and document my journey as a developer.

Now that the course is over I find it a bit weird not getting up at 4 am or meeting up with my group on Google Hangouts twice a day, but I've realized that the worst thing you can possibly do is to stop pushing yourself forward. Even if it turns out to be one of those lazy days that you spend parked in front of the TV indulging in comfort food, make it a point to ask yourself if there's anything on Github that you can improve.

Earlier today after I removed some comments I deemed unnessary from an older spec file, I tried to push up my changes to Github and I saw a dreaded error in my terminal I had never seen about Xcode. But then I laughed because I remembered that every day on the course I saw some kind of error that I had never seen before. I told myself, "Take a deep breath, Google the crap out of this and all will be well." As it turns out, I fixed the issue after trying LITERALLY the second thing in a list of Stack Overflow suggestions and it was all good. I had a tiny, yet totally deserved celebration in my head and continued with my day.

It's the little things, they say, and it's true.

This week I've been looking to get fresh inspiration on what I should learn next, and I've decided to dip my toes into some Swift. I've been following a few of the video tutorials on Ray Wenderlich's site, and I'm loving it so far. Being a super visual learner, I find the tutorials to be pretty useful for this beginner stuff. It reminds me of those first few mind-blowing days of learning Ruby. I'm back at Hello world again, except this time it looks like this:

print("Hello world")

What I love about having gone through Makers is that I feel like they gave me a beginners Lego set to start my collection, and while I've built what's on the box already I'm constantly acquiring more pieces and doing what I want with them.

It's a truly unique and incredible feeling when you wake up and don't want to go back to sleep because real life is even better than the pink fluffy stuff your dreams are made of. Code is my Pikachu, and to it I say, "I CHOOSE YOU."