It’s time. Actually, I’m two days early but I couldn’t wait to get started building my chrysalis. Over the next 12 weeks I will transform myself from magister of the Ivory Tower into an acolyte of the Internet and begin a new life.
Today was all about getting me and my trusty MacBook Pro ready to do the heavy lifting of web development. I’d have to say I felt a mixture of emotion. Excited at the prospect of a new career, nostalgic for my youthful command line BASIC programming of a Commodore 64 and overwhelmed by the sheer volume of what I don’t know and how much I missed in between. I remembered back when I was fourteen how I tried to program a way to track my father’s stock portfolio using the Commodore. I’d never heard the word spreadsheet in my life. Instead I was trying to figure out how to Peek and Poke at the memory. Soon after, puberty whacked me with a two by four and I was far more concerned with the Prom than programming.
Today, as I went through the step by step tutorial of building a virtual machine on my laptop, and learning the web development pipeline of Git, Github, and Heroku, I understood just how much I have to learn. In my previous life as a neuroscientist I had to write programs for data collection and analysis as I tried to understand what the brain does and how it works. So I have an idea of what I’m getting into starting The Firehose Project bootcamp. However, as I watched the scripts flash past in the terminal window yesterday, issuing commands that I haven’t a clue what they do or how they do it, I understood why the founders chose the firehose metaphor for their bootcamp.
I’ve taken my first sip, and although I’m not sure if I still have lips, I am very excited to get started building the tools I will use to handle it like a pro.
Featured image from: http://i.ytimg.com/vi/-gsm_ZyJz_s/maxresdefault.jpg
titanium-cranium 