On being a baby geek
May. 1st, 2012 11:28 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kaberettI recently went up to 30mg citalopram daily, and the main result - if it is one - that I've noticed is that I've started doing stuff. It's not just that I'm more cheerful - that my baseline mood has shifted from "wretched" to "content", which approximately happened with 20mg - it's that my capacity to Get Shit Done has improved massively.
The areas where this is most obvious are learning and volunteering - and, in particular, getting my hands at least a little dirty with tech stuff.
For instance, some time ago I signed up to Stanford's free online Computer Science 101 course; it started two weeks ago; I promptly decided it was going too slowly, and am now a fair way into the Javascript section of Codecademy.
The CS101 course has the advantages of actual lecture notes - unlike, for example, their cryptography course, where it's obligatory to watch video in order to extract the information - and of letting you play around with images.
Codecademy, on the other hand, has the advantages of using actual Javascript, rather than hiding the real world from you (CS101 uses
And it doesn't hurt that they provide you with ACHIEVEMENT BADGES every time you complete a course of lessons, either ;)
In the most practical sense, what this is doing for me is giving me confidence. My volunteering for dreamwidth so far has been focussed on things I think of as largely non-technical: I tag the posts in![[site community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/comm_staff.png)
dw_suggestions and occasionally submit some, I cheerlead in #dreamwidth, I've done a code tour in dw_dev and written up how I did it. Now, however, I've got my Dreamhack set up; I've been assigned a bug (it's effort-minor but THAT TOTALLY COUNTS); and I intend to get it patched - or, well, let's rather aim for getting started on my patch, to reduce the risk of being eaten by sharks ;) - before bed today.
And this is really what CS101, and Codecademy, are about - for me. It's not the particular language: I'm not sure when Javascript is going to be relevant to me. My biggest problem at the moment (more generally?) tends to be confidence - oh, I can't do that, I'll think, I'll just make a mess of it, and then someone else will have to fix it, so I'd best leave well enough alone - and what these websites and these people are doing are telling me that it's okay to make mistakes and it's okay to not know everything and those are messages I pretty well always need to hear.
So thank you, #dreamwidth, and thank you the wider Internet, and thank you drugs. You're all great.
The areas where this is most obvious are learning and volunteering - and, in particular, getting my hands at least a little dirty with tech stuff.
For instance, some time ago I signed up to Stanford's free online Computer Science 101 course; it started two weeks ago; I promptly decided it was going too slowly, and am now a fair way into the Javascript section of Codecademy.
The CS101 course has the advantages of actual lecture notes - unlike, for example, their cryptography course, where it's obligatory to watch video in order to extract the information - and of letting you play around with images.
Codecademy, on the other hand, has the advantages of using actual Javascript, rather than hiding the real world from you (CS101 uses
print(), rather than console.log(), among other minor travesties); and, at this stage, of being approximately on-demand. They're currently running a project called Code Year - which aims to teach Javascript, HTML, CSS and their intersections over the course of a year, for the sake of a shiny website or somesuch - but in addition to the basic "here's how variables work" weekly lessons, there's a number of side-projects in which you can build little games, which I at least am finding fun.And it doesn't hurt that they provide you with ACHIEVEMENT BADGES every time you complete a course of lessons, either ;)
In the most practical sense, what this is doing for me is giving me confidence. My volunteering for dreamwidth so far has been focussed on things I think of as largely non-technical: I tag the posts in
dw_suggestions and occasionally submit some, I cheerlead in #dreamwidth, I've done a code tour in dw_dev and written up how I did it. Now, however, I've got my Dreamhack set up; I've been assigned a bug (it's effort-minor but THAT TOTALLY COUNTS); and I intend to get it patched - or, well, let's rather aim for getting started on my patch, to reduce the risk of being eaten by sharks ;) - before bed today.And this is really what CS101, and Codecademy, are about - for me. It's not the particular language: I'm not sure when Javascript is going to be relevant to me. My biggest problem at the moment (more generally?) tends to be confidence - oh, I can't do that, I'll think, I'll just make a mess of it, and then someone else will have to fix it, so I'd best leave well enough alone - and what these websites and these people are doing are telling me that it's okay to make mistakes and it's okay to not know everything and those are messages I pretty well always need to hear.
So thank you, #dreamwidth, and thank you the wider Internet, and thank you drugs. You're all great.
(no subject)
Date: 2012-05-02 02:52 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2012-05-02 06:58 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2012-05-02 08:47 am (UTC)I set one up when I joined Dreamwidth but never did anything with it, so I let it go when they migrated them. The trouble is that after spending my working week wrangling code, I don't usually want to in my spare time. I'm considering doing Codeacademy for fun during maternity leave, as my web skills are rather stuck in the late 1990s.
(no subject)
Date: 2012-05-04 03:30 am (UTC)I was going to take some courses myself but never got time so I'll have to play catch up on that sometime later this year, I guess; in the meantime, I would totally learn JavaScript but I can't. I've read books, I've taken courses, and I swear after all that it's Chinese to me. I can read really simple to not-quite complex JS but only some of it and when it gets really complex/truncated, forget it - I might as well be trying to read hieroglyphics (oh, and I can't write JS at all without samples to work off of). I can't break the barrier with it. HTML and CSS were not this hard for me, in fact they were both fairly easy to get right off the bat. Perl/s2 is not so hard for me either (can totally read it, but cannot write it without at least an in-place framework to build off of somehow). But JS? It slays me every time. Do you have any tips on what might make it easier to grasp?