I didn’t sleep well last night. Several demons kept me awake: anxiety about being smart enough, guilt over spending the tuition money, worries about traffic and parking, for some reason. I probably only got four hours or so. It didn’t matter. I was wired.
Some of the other students seemed tentative, so I decided to seek out those that were ready to socialize. There are lots of interesting people in this class: a chef, a yoga instructor, a rock climber, people from India, Germany, France, Japan. Some living has been done.
And it’s been done in a relatively short amount of time. I am not the oldest (that distinction goes to a friendly gentleman with snowy hair) but I’m certainly in the upper age bracket. I’m thirty-nine. I identified three or four people who I believe are older than me and maybe six or seven who I believe to be within three years up or down. The rest are quite young.
The morning was given to introductions of staff and students, some housekeeping notes, and dozens of pizzas. Justin, the Pittsburgh TE director, made the foreboding and somehow simultaneously inspiring statement, “You will be changed in the next fourteen weeks.” This was echoed shortly afterwards by Rob, the aforementioned yoga instructor. He nudged me on the shoulder and pointed at a screen full of number-smeared gobbledygook. He posed the question, “Are we going to understand this some day?”
I don’t know, Rob. I don’t know.
We were each given a laptop, a mouse, and a spiffy book bag in which to carry our new tools. I was particularly pleased with the new book bag, as my old one has seen a few decades and is tearing at the straps.
The afternoon was for our first lesson. It was basically all about Git Bash, a shell which lets one write command lines, and Version Control. In layman’s terms, writing command lines is the programmer’s equivalent of manipulating folders, but done on a low level of the computer with much more flexibility and, let’s be honest, cachet. Version Control is software which helps to save all versions of a project on which many programmers might be working at the same time.
Our instructor Tom went over the material, made some jokes, and assigned us our first exercises–twenty questions on using Bit Bash and Git (TE’s preferred Version Control). It went well. I had a moment of panic when I didn’t know where to find a tilde (~ ) on my keyboard (it’s hidden way up on the left, completely obscured by the escape key), but after that things went smoothly. The homework was done collaboratively, all of us typing away until we hit a snag and then breaking into conversations, divining the meaning of questions, prying at our memories, comparing recently scribbled notes. It was sorta fun.
Day [1] awaits.
From Retail to Programming 