I arrived at TE early this morning and hung around talking to Drew, a nineteen-year-old computer-wiz who builds his own video games and has already made a website. We were looking forward to the lesson because we were finally going to do something with our code. We were finally going to write a usable program.

Up until today we had pushed Sisyphus-like up a mountain of logic exercises. With command line programming, we could write questions and take user input as answers. We can then convert the user input into integers and process those integers in all types of fun ways. This changes the game dramatically.

For instance, one could ask what the temperature is today. Then, you could set code so that if the user inputs over eighty degrees, they receive a written answer that says, “Wow, that’s really hot.” Or, if it’s under twenty degrees, the message could say, “Hope you have a jacket!” Obviously, no one was writing things so PG. The fun of making the computer say ridiculously profane things provides amazing release after four days of manipulating arrays with “for” loops.

I think for most people there, it woke up their creative side after days of leaning hard on the logic end of their brain. For me, it stirred a desire to write. When I got home after an eleven hour day, I immediately sat down to start coding my sword and sorcery text adventure game. Release date pending.

I went in the day after the marathon ready to clean up my work from the day before. I had five questions still to do. These questions had plagued me the day before so terribly that I passed over them and forged on, leaving unseemly red X’s hanging over their titles while I completed the rest. Fresh and rested in the morning, I blew through them in twenty minutes.

I didn’t do so well on the quiz, though. I think there was some burnout yesterday, and I dropped a few questions that I should have gotten.

We covered arrays today and “for” loops. A For Loop basically says that we want a block of code to repeat over and over until a certain barrier is reached. An example of the barrier might be i < 5. So long as i < 5 is true, the code we wrote will execute over and over and over.

There were some things in this lecture that were new to me, but overall the prework is still paying dividends.

It was picture day for the Pathway program, so I wore a button-up shirt and a blazer. I was definitely the fanciest one there. They took us outside and we stood in front of the obligatory red-brick wall for our snapshots. Mine came out fine, but I think I might stick with the LinkedIn picture that I already have.

After that, we were given our exercises for arrays and for loops. It wasn’t nearly as bad as yesterday, the workload cut in half. The questions were complex in their logic, but I learned so much yesterday that the struggle was minimal. I was out of there by five o’clock.

Tomorrow is Friday and the end of the week. I’m enjoying the hell out of these days, but I am certainly looking forward to sleeping in and having a relaxing day.

Today I arrived at TechElevator at 7:30 am and left at 7:30 pm.

And it was awesome.

The day began with another quiz and I scored another perfect. I was particularly proud because I was only one of three students to score a perfect. Next, we had a three-hour lecture on conditional logic and the use of Methods. As was true yesterday, much of the material was familiar from my prework and the lesson didn’t seem terribly challenging.

After lunch we had another Pathway meeting where we went over the plans for the entire boot camp. This was both unsettling and exciting. Pathway focuses on the interviewing process and, I think for everyone, this is the most terrifying part. Getting the job is what this is all about. I can definitely see the allure of diving into the code and ignoring Caitie(the Pathway program director)’s admirable and tenacious attempts to help us. But I am determined not to do this. I have promised myself to try as hard on all of the Pathway tasks as I do on the coding exercises.

Though, admittedly, it would be hard to put forth more effort than I did today on the conditional logic exercises. We had thirty-five problems which could each take anywhere from three to thirty minutes to solve, depending if I got hung up on something silly. The quickest students worked from 1:00 till just after 6:00. I was there till 7:30 and there were still students kneeling over their keyboards when I left.

I felt almost high on the way home. The closest I could equate the feeling was to when I would work all day on a novel. My mind felt numb, stretched out and buzzing. My thoughts were scattered and restless. They still are. The only difference between the marathon sprints on a novel and those on code is that with the code I know what I got right and what I got wrong.

It’s nice to know where I stand for once.

Today was straight-up fantastic. We started by taking a quiz on the previous day’s lesson and I scored a perfect 10 out of 10. I grew a little panicky when Tom (the instructor) said there would be a quiz. I wasn’t convinced that everything had sunk in with the gits and the version controls and the whatnots. But it turns out it did sink in. I arrived about an hour before class and reviewed the homework from the day before. This study probably took me from an 8 to a 10 on the quiz.

After the quiz, we had a three-hour lecture on variables and data structures. I have wondered since last summer whether I was studying the right things and whether any of it would pay off once I got to the boot camp. The answers are yes and yes. For anyone who is wondering about how to go about studying for a boot camp–study the crap out of HTML, CSS, and (most importantly) JavaScript. Knowledge of these three areas will get you through the second day. For what that’s worth.

There were some differences between the way variables and data structures are used in JavaScript and the way they are used in C# (which is the language I’m studying). For instance, in C# you must be specific as to whether your variable is an integer, a decimal, a Boolean, or one of a few other possibilities. In JavaScript, the word “var” covers everything, much to Tom’s disciplined disdain.

After the lesson, we broke for lunch and then had a Pathway meeting focused on StrengthFinders. Pathway is the program in TE that focuses on our resumes, interviewing, and LinkedIn profiles. We did some ice-breakers using the StrengthFinders program and got to know some of the students from the other class (Java-studiers–a mysterious and befuddling pack of yahoos). We were split into groups and made to argue over an imaginary scenario where we were stranded after a plane crash in the northern Canadian woodlands. It was a fun argument, but when the answer to the survival question was revealed, it became clear that our team would have died within hours.

After the Pathway meeting, we split back up into groups of C# and Java and went to work on our exercises. The work was long and tedious, but pretty easy, save one question about Bill and Jill painting rooms which had the whole lab banging their heads off the gray-painted walls. We’ll try again tomorrow.

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.