The Asynchroneity of Life
A month ago, I discussed asynchronous code and the power it has to make code blocs much more efficient. While one code bloc is taking its sweet time to run, another one can execute in the meantime. I drew a parallel between a patisserie baker’s process and the disparity in efficiency between synchronous and asynchronous code execution. That was fun, but now I want to draw a different, more ‘real-life’ parallel.
I want to compare asynchronous code to my life and specifically my decision making during the covid pandemic. Sometimes life as you know it gets blown up by a pandemic (Who would have thought!?) and completely ruins your plans. You can either sit back and let it destroy the experience you thought you would have OR you can make adjustments so things, maybe better things, can happen in the meantime.
Think SetTimeout(). It introduces an inherent delay in the execution of a line of code, thereby allowing time for other code to be executed. We can be particularly grateful for asynchronous programming when working with code that takes time execute.
That’s precisely what I’ve done to my college tenure. As that “line of code”, which is the covid pandemic, runs its course, I am putting my college time on the backburner and instead developing a new skill to make me better equip for the modern, tech-centric world.
setTimeout(() => console.log(‘College”), 1 year)console.log(‘Work experience, travel, Flatiron Software Engineering Bootcamp…Pandemic”)
Although this decision is not one that was made by many college students around the country, it is surely a popular one among my friends at Harvard. We are all told the Harvard experience is invaluable, tranformative, not to be wasted. Well, it sure does feel like a waste to me to spend a year of it at home with my parents, away from friends and my professors, taking classes on my computer.
So instead, I’m enlisting the setTimeOut() function on that whole 4 year college plan and instead I enrolled in Flatiron’s Software Engineering Bootcamp. As I enter my last week of the 15-week program, I thought I’d take a second to reflect on the past few months.
Entering the program, I knew little to nothing about coding and software engineering. It is something that always seemed appealing to me as someone who loved and still loves math and logic and equations. I started my year off working for a healthcare startup delivering a smart, food-as-medicine platform designed to drive lasting dietary change and lower LR healthcare costs. From the sidelines, I watched the company go through the tech development process to support their needs, on both the backend and frontend. The success of the company was so clearly tied to both their customer-facing and backend data warehouse applications. But with no experience, I could not be of much help. So, the only way to change that fact was to dive headfirst into a full-time intensive bootcamp.
Flatiron’s software engineering bootcamp is split into 5 phases or ‘mods’. You enter the program in a cohort of about 20 people (class size vary) along with a lead instructor, which together makes up the group that will be by your side for the entire program. In each phase, a new instructor will join your cohort to teach a new language. Each phase incorporates learning a new language, testing that language with a code challenge and applying that new language in the form of building a project with a partner. This format puts you in stretch mode all the time. There is not a moment of ‘comfort’ throughout the 4 months. Whether it be week 1, learning the first language, Ruby, or Week 10, learning Javascript, all students are novices most, if not all, of the time. That time, about 85%, as a seemingly naive coder can be really hard to manage, especially as a perfectionist and someone who likes to know things, well. But the difficulty of that times makes the other 15%, where you get the feeling, “Wow I’m actually getting it…omg I understand React Objects” really… really sweet.
The program starts with Ruby which enables the building of an in-the-terminal first project. Then, the program content pivots to Ruby on Rails where students use the frontend framework to build a project in a browser still using Ruby. Then, making a huge leap, students learn Javascript. This moment was probably the hardest for me. I went from feeling comfortable, or at least starting to, to feeling so confused and unsettled. But once Week 2 of Javascript commenced, thing started to click and my anxiety calmed. Project week arrived again and this time, I built an app based on Airbnb, where a user can view house options, book a stay, like a property, etc. Finally, Phase 4 teaches React, a Javascript library for building user interfaces on the frontend. React uses JSX (Javascript XML), a combination of HTML and Javascript, makes it easy to create and append elements, much easier than in Vanilla JS. Project Week follows, which ends up being a dry run for phase 5, which is when students build their final project, solo.
I am currently in Phase 5, working desperately on my ‘thesis’ of the program. I’m building a social media app for food bloggers, which integrates a monetarization feature where users can get paid based on the popularity of their account and their posts. The idea arose from my own interaction with the large and growing community of professional chefs on websites like Bon Appetite, home cooks on youtube and food bloggers on instagram and tiktok. Shouldn’t their be an app that unifies all these community in one app and one that allows creators to make money off the thing they pour their heart and soul into. I am starting simple — with an application that allows users to post recipes, see their friends’ posted recipes, and interact with those posts through ‘likes’ and ‘cooks’ feature. It is not an easy task, to say the least, but building an application on my own has given me a moment to reflect on how much I’ve learned and how far I’ve come in less than 4 months.
I went from knowing next to nothing about software engineering to being able to build my own website in under 2 weeks. That’s pretty wild. And I’m proud of it. Although I would say I knew it would be, all the pain, anxiety, laughter, moments where I definitely said “What the heck is this…it looks like gibberish” was well worth it.
And all of this was made possible by a SetTimeOut() function. It’s ok if life phases, like college, that typically happen synchronously, get interrupted. Life and learning are not linear and honestly its better that way. Its asynchroneity gives you the opportunity to do things you would not otherwise, like enrolling in a fulltime coding bootcamp.
