Intro to WDI

On October 12th, almost a month ago at this point, I started the Web Development Immersive (WDI) program at General Assembly (GA). Before starting the program, I felt like I was learning a lot on my own. I was picking up some fundamentals and a sense of the larger development picture, by moving through Codecademy, reading wikipedia definitions of what things like APIs are, and perusing code blogs and books. But now it feel likes my knowledge set is growing by such comparatively huge leaps and bounds, that I can't imagine properly having learned all these things on my own, in the timeframes I would like to.

The constant is the sheer amount of information in this world of the computer. The difference is the exposure/internalization rates are way higher with the resources that GA offers. The instructors just know a ton, and are generally better at relaying that information to me than a video tutorial or stack overflow answer is able to.

Some more goals:

• Pause the sub-goal of learning C++. Contextually deeper language, from what I gather. It is important that someone understands it, but that person isn't me right now.
• Finish a draft version of a personal website and portfolio set by Christmas.
• Work through the first 10 problems on Project Euler (projecteuler.net) before new year's.
• Finish Infinite Jest. Raced through the first 14% before starting WDI, and now I'm creeping through the remainder. It's tough to find outside time to work on things that aren't code. But it also seems important to carve out other avenues at the same time.
• Improve some of the vaguer habitual qualities. Primarily focus. There are actually an infinite number of ideas that you can make come to life with code. I find myself coming up with more ideas than I'm able to actualize, and at times these new ideas are distracting me from actualizing the ones I'm currently working on.

There is so much to learn, and I don't want this blog to turn into a regurgitation of those things. So I'll just pick and choose interesting things as I go. My favorite thing so far has been solving math problems with code. Coming soon, we'll explore that concept further.

Time is Galleons, little brother."

- Fred Weasley