Today was my best day yet at Tech Elevator. Today, I had a lot of wins and everything began to make a little bit more sense.
To open the lecture, Tom put a picture of a small man standing on the shore looking forlorn as an unthinkably large tidal wave crashes towards him. He said, “You’re that guy. The tidal wave is the amount of information I’m going to throw at you today.”
He wasn’t joking.
The next three and a half hours flew by as Tom described how collections work. How we make classes, which are blueprints that we can use to make an infinity of objects, about properties of these classes that can be used over and over again in perpetuity, about the nature of namespaces and how they define the vast libraries from which we mine nuggets of genius which Microsoft has been burying in the .Net Framework for nearly twenty years. It was heady stuff.
It seemed overwhelming in the moment, and when the homework was delivered everyone fell into a slump: forty-seven tests. Forty. Seven. Forty-seven opportunities to press “Run Test” and have the obnoxious red banner of failure wag like a tongue from the laptop screen. Almost as one, we put our heads down and began to climb the mountain once more.
But something peculiar happened after the second class I created. It started to make sense. I started to see the logic. It started to become easy.
To be clear, nothing–absolutely nothing–has been easy for me during the last eight days of school. It has all been very, very difficult–either because it was hard to understand or because of the sheer mass of work assigned. But I flew through the collections homework. And, I would never admit this to Tom for fear that he might oblige, I could have done a few more.
From Retail to Programming 