I have less pretty pictures for you this week. The most I saw of the sunshine looked similar to this:

At least it was sunshine. It “rained” for like a minute one day and the umbrellas came out en masse. I was perfectly happy in a hoodie, but I definitely felt like an outsider. I might need to buy an umbrella, this whole trying to not look like a tourist thing is harder than I thought. Although I’ve had more people ask me for directions this week than I ever have in my life combined so I think the hair and the nose piercing are good SF camouflage.

This week was a teensy bit rollercoastery for me. We started out with a fairly easy CSS/fun jQuery tricks problem and then tackled a pretty epic sprint on the N-Queens problem. N-queens is the idea that you need to place n (a number) of chess queens on an nxn chess board so that none of the queens can attack any other queen. I think they’ve only solved it up to 27 ( and that was people from Hack Reactor). I got a little flustered with that one as algorithms were never my strong suit before this (it’s why I got the “conditionally acceptance” at App Academy - thank god, might I add). I think though I’m just being too hard on myself. Not every software engineer deals with something as crazy as the n-queens problem on an everyday basis. Our more traditional daily toy problems (similar to tech interview questions) are fairly straight forward and I can code a bubble sort algorithm in about 5 minutes (maybe 10 with one hand tied behind my back).

I think that’s what Hack Reactor has done for me more than anything else. It’s made me accept my flaws, but know that everyone has them and there is always more to learn. I’m a good intuitive coder, but I’m no good with the lingo of it. We all are here to learn to become great coders Software Engineers.

Short post this week, sorry. I have dinner with friends to go to and my Sunday is too peaceful and sunny (and full of awesome 50th anniversary Doctor Who) for any more words.

This article could easily be subtitled: Glimmering punctua of pure clarity and childlike wonderment. But then I’d be jacking my title from Marcus (our lead instructor/one of Hack Reactor’s co-founders). Hell week (as the instructors affectionately call week one) is semi-officially over and I am more content than I have ever been in my entire life. I will admit that as I got ready and rode the train into the city on Monday morning I had my doubts. Was I cut out for this, would anyone like me, was this program going to be totally not what I expected? Let me tell you my friends, it is more (any adjective is useless here) than I can describe.

On Monday morning I told myself not to be nervous, but the impostor syndrome and general unknown was super strong. The train ride was scary, the solo walk to the building was scary, the first few uncomfortable introductions in the kitchen area where breakfast is served were scary, but I have come to love this sight:

It’s so typical San Francisco. Teeny entryway wedged between a Payless Shoes and a sketchy looking pawn shop. It’s after you step into the elevator, which is typically a little creaky, and emerge on the top floor that the magic starts:

This week has been a blur. We had lectures that ranged from how to be an effective student to the principles of time complexity on different data structures. We implemented our own auto resizing hash tables (well some of us did, me and my excellent partner, Sara, who started out as a blog stalker apparently and ended up being an awesome lady and I’m glad to call her my friend, got through most of the extra credit work and so got to a point where we had to tackle resizing hash tables). We tried valiantly to learn 30ish names while trying to cram in as much computer science as possible (I can proudly say I know the whole junior class - my cohort). We learned the least and most reasonable places to eat and wander during the day and after dark and we all developed what I think will be a pretty awesome camaraderie that will definitely benefit me for years to come.

My life has been completely altered in ways I don’t even know how to quantify yet. We’ve covered computer science concepts in the past week that I learned over the course of a year back in college when I first tried to be a computer science major. The thought scared me at first. When I realized we were covering things I had learned before, I was afraid I would feel the same way about them, like I wasn’t good enough to get through them. That was always my fear in college, that I was just fooling myself and everyone around me.

So I spent at least half of this first week waiting for the other shoe to drop. Technically it did drop, but not in the ways I thought it would. It dropped when I realized that this thing that I can do with my brain and this keyboard is pretty damn amazing. That I am pretty amazing. I can have an off day, my recursion algorithm can go unexpected places and my crafted tests could not pass, but that’s the life of a software engineer. Things don’t just get done by typing out code as fast as your fingers can move, they get done by running into walls, refactoring, researching what other amazing people have done, and bouncing ideas off of your fellow engineers.

To sum up all that wall of text: Life is pretty damn awesome now and there was nothing hellish about this week.

I meant to post before today, but the picture I wanted to use in this post wasn’t available yet and I managed to get a cold… Everyone at Hackbright was getting sick and Ava’s husband also got a cold, so I guess my time was nigh. Thankfully Ava’s an amazing nurse (she’s strict though, she won’t even let me have a Diet Coke).

I did have a fun week rest of the week in spite of how I feel today. Thursday we stayed at home and Ava got some awesome work done on her final project and I just played around some more with Angular tutorials and double checked her semi-colons in JavaScript. Thursday night though, was awesome. We did this:

I got to go to my first ever geek girl dinner! Ava hooked me up and I really hope I can go to more in the future. We went to San Jose to visit CISCO‘s main campus. It was super inspiring and totally pumped me up for next week. Also they had tasty food and gave us T-shirts and I got yelled at by Ava for saying I was a student and not an engineer. I won’t make that mistake again!

Yesterday I trekked through three different transit systems to get back down to San Jose by myself to visit my other bestie and have dinner with her family. We had lots of fun and visited the giant library next to the SJSU campus. She and I share a ridiculous love of reading and I think she just wanted to rub it in that I will have no time to read for a long while.

Hack Reactor starts on Monday and I’ve been drinking tea and sitting around in my pajamas all day in hopes of feeling decent by Monday. Wish me luck!

Still pretty quiet here. I’ve been helping Ava with her game and looking at some basic tutorials for Backbone and Angular. Then I got sidetracked into learning VIM.

I did hike up the epicness that is Taylor St on a lunch break with Ava to go look at Huntington Park. The views were amazing and I love that I can still wear a T-shirt (no sweater/coat necessary) at all times, even on my evening trek to the BART station and “home” home (Ava was upset by the quotes around the word home so I had to change it).

On the way up:

Looking down:

Looking at the Bay Bridge through the buildings (another thing I love, it looks like stereotypical San Francisco everywhere, tall buildings, funky old fixtures, and a strange mixture of people types):

Hack Reactor starts next Monday, but that doesn’t mean I’m sitting around in my pajamas petting Ava’s dogs (that’s just what I do on Sundays).

I’m having a bit of a “take your roommate to class” week. So I’m crashing Hackbright for the week. It’s really perfect timing for this because they are just starting on their projects so the aren’t as super formal right now.

Just hanging out in a space with coding going on has been amazing. The women are all spread all around the space working on code and randomly chatting. The instructors have been coming around and giving informal talks on subjects that people are getting stuck on (I’m currently listening to a talk on how 3D works). I’ve finished up some of the extra credit prework for HackReactor and I’m going to be going to some awesome tech talks and a Geek Girl Dinner this week!

I’m definitely less sad now that I’m busy. I’m worried it’s going to crash at some point, but it still hasn’t caught up that I’m actually here for any time longer than a couple weeks so I think the crash might also lead to some excitement about the fact that I’m in a place I want to be and have been working toward for so long.