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The Beginning of My Programming Journey - Wendy Randolph
Updated automatically every 5 minutes

Let's start at the very beginning (A very good place to start)

[ANYlcfA30s]

I wanted to get into programming or something programming-adjacent,
perhaps using my enjoyment of teaching and helping people create
things. I had a few ideas for apps, so I thought I'd begin my journey
working toward making an app that would be useful to my interests. My
exploration of programming would be in the off hours of my 40hr/week
job. The closest thing to programming experience I have is reading
half a chapter of Learning Python and building a website in HTML &
CSS for my handmade purses 15 years ago.

A Tale: Her Swift story

[ANYlcfD4u3]                  [ANYlcfC9G_]

On February 24, 2022, I started learning Swift by using the game app
Playgrounds. As I progressed through the levels and explored
increasingly difficult puzzles, I improved my problem-solving skills
by better articulating problems, breaking down large problems into
smaller pieces, talking through possible solutions, and finding a
rubber ducky to talk to (actually, it's a Clojure-green-colored
froggie... foreshadowing?) I also followed along with some beginner
Swift tutorials from Code With Chris on YouTube and Hacking With
SwiftUI.

Let's get down to business

[ANYlcfAqFY]

It's challenging for me to sit and use a computer due to RSI and
hyper-mobile joints, so I set up my computer workstation with the
best tools I had and will work towards small improvements as I go. In
the beginning of this journey, I got out of my chair every 15 min to
move for 30 seconds to help with stiffness and problem solving. When
I had at least half a day to work on things, I would switch topics
every two hours (topics were written on notecards)

        

  * Swift Playgrounds
  * Read Book (at the time, a book from Robert's collection, The Art
    of Learning: An Inner Journey to Optimal Performance by Josh
    Waitzkin)
  * Code with Chris tutorial for Swift UI
  * Hacking with Swift - 100 days of Swift UI

Let It Go (or, Dealing with Frustration)

[ANYlcfCk0v]

Sometimes I felt stuck trying to solve Playgrounds puzzles and
understand the Swift concepts. When I got in a rut, sometimes I would
just sit there frustrated and bored, reading the same thing over and
over. Over time, I realized this was counterproductive, so instead of
staying in my rut, I would get up from the computer and do something
else: dance to some upbeat music, go outside, go fold laundry. When I
was a bit more clear-headed, I could come back to the topic I was
working on, or pick a different topic card and work on that.

Learning is hard

[ANYlcfAb3Q]

Sometimes, I did not want to deal with this struggle of learning. I
could not dance my way out of this one. I had to think about my ideas
and attitudes towards learning something new. Did I assume this would
be easy? Am I upset if it's not easy? Do I want to grow? What did I
think growing would feel like?  Is seeking out challenges more useful
than avoiding them? These questions are best met with honesty, saying
your answers out loud or writing it down. I found reading The Art of
Learning by Josh Waitzkin helpful. I read it over a month or so and
thought about learning as discomfort, seeking out challenges instead
of avoiding them, and the idea of keeping up with time when I make a
mistake, rather than being frozen and falling behind - getting out of
sync with time.

A Whole New World (of Clojure)

[ANYlcfAF_5]

At some point I finished the Art of Learning, so I picked another
book from Robert's collection: Learn ClojureScript by Andrew
Meredith. He said I'd probably get to my app goal quicker and learn a
more useful language if I focused on ClojureScript rather than Swift.
I abandoned Swift for the time being (Clojure seemed more useful
overall). I started through Learning ClojureScript, googling the many
terms I was unfamiliar with. As I read through the book and worked on
the examples, I used other resources:

  * Clojuredocs.org > clojure.core
  * Clojuredocs.org > Quickref for Clojure Core
  * Clojure.org > Learn Clojure
  * Clojure.org > Cheatsheet
  * https://learnxinyminutes.com/docs/clojure/

"No man ever steps in the same river twice"

[ANYlcfBYfL]

I also would watch/listen to Rich Hickey & Stu Halloway talks and
google unfamiliar terms: epoch, concurrency, discrete, atomic,
orthogonal, and more.

  * Hammock Driven Development
  * Simple Made Easy
  * Sherlock Holmes, Consulting Developer
  * Are We There yet?

In Are We There Yet?, Rich quotes Heraclitus, "No man ever steps in
the same river twice" which sounded a lot like what Pocahontas sang
in Disney's 1995 film: " What I like most about rivers is you can't
step in the same river twice." I had to look it up and apparently
Heraclitus, a Greek philosopher born in 544 B.C. said, "No man ever
steps in the same river twice, for it's not the same river and he's
not the same man." I guess Heraclitus said it before the Disney
princess, by a few thousand years.

Sure, I didn't understand every concept in these talks, but I was
getting some of it. I felt like a piece of flypaper that is trying to
create a picture; I don't have enough dead bugs on me to make an
image yet. But I keep near the light so more bugs will get stuck on
me.

REPL, VS Code, and Calva

[ANYlcfDDbh]

On April 18, 2022, I started a learning journal to log what I did
each day towards learning Clojure and related tools. Robert suggested
I read History of Clojure by Rich Hickey, which I started reading and
have enjoyed so far. I like "Table 1. Clojure's data format" from the
paper and keep it at hand for reference. I like to refer to this
table and similar from clojure.org and clojuredocs.org.

Robert showed me how to access REPL on my laptop, so I started typing
in some examples there that he gave me. Later, I tried out some
examples from Learning ClojureScript page 41 involving math, so I
opened a Notes window next to my REPL to test out some things before
I loaded it into the REPL. Robert chuckled at my set up and was glad
I figured out that it's nice to have a place to write code you want
to test. I googled for text editors to use with Clojure, and since I
don't want to spend time learning emacs, IntelliJ, etc, I thought
Atom or VS Code would be good, based on betweentheparens.com's
suggestions. Robert said Atom is dead, so VS Code it is!

Calva...

[ANYlcfBzRm]

I downloaded VS Code with Calva extension. Initially I had some
trouble starting the "Fire up the "Getting Started" REPL" command
because the Calva documentation assumed I knew how to access the
Command Palette. Luckily, Peter's keystrokes are recorded in the "Get
Started with Clojure in VS Code in 20 seconds" video, so I replicated
what he did, and I was IN! I read through and played with the
hello_repl, hello_paredit, and welcome_to_clojure.

After a few hours of staring at that black screen with all those
colorful s-expressions I didn't understand, I was sick of not getting
it. I should have taken my own advice and taken a break from the
computer. Instead, I started documenting where I felt some Clojure or
Calva documentation was lacking and left me hanging so I could
approach those avenues later for improvement. But I was overwhelmed
and upset with all I didn't know.

[ANYlcfBwMn]

Into the Unknown

[ANYlcfBCKN]

I needed an attitude adjustment. I started this adventure. Me. Did I
think I'd immediately understand everything in a new world, new
language, new tools, new ways? Does that sound like what happens in
adventures? No. Well, I'm an adventurer. I'm a gosh darn character in
a RPG sandbox, and I don't know if that lump on the ground is a turd
or an apple, but I'm going to guess, try, evaluate, repeat until I
figure it out. Listening to "Into the Unknown" from Frozen 2 was
helpful. :) I am going into the unknown. Get used to feeling in over
your head.

Go The Distance

[ANYlcfA_z5]

At times, reading documentation and listening to heady talks felt
useless because I didn't understand every single thing, but I
believed it would be helpful. Sometimes, I'd get discouraged because
I didn't know exactly where I was going or what I'd do next. But if I
did SOMETHING - read more or go back a few pages in my Clojure book,
tested some things in the REPL, made coding errors and read them and
looked up why they were errors - I'd be one bit closer to ... whatever.

What I think I've learned so far:

  * How to describe problems better
  * How to describe solutions better
  * Use keyboard shortcuts
  * Parens are no big deal.
  * Elements are added to the back of vectors
  * Elements are added to the front of lists.
  * How to Identify expressions, functions, arguments, keywords,
    strings,
  * Getting there with def, defn, fn, map, namespace
  * Some differences between lists (grow at front) and vectors (grow
    at end)
  * What's a macro - its magic :)
  * Calva is pretty cool. Some concepts are not explained in helpful
    order, some features are over-explained.
  * Just because the result of an expression is always the last form/
    expression evaluated doesn't mean the first, second, third, etc
    form/expression is ignored. It is taken into account.
  * Functions being First Class in Clojure means functions are
    performing actions. They can do stuff. In OO programming, data
    does stuff. Functions can be treated as values.
  * For is a macro.
  * Def is a special form, creates a var. Def is a special snowflake.

How Far I'll Go

[ANYlcfCLVs]

The thing I've learned the most through this journey, I think, is
just getting more comfortable with being uncomfortable and not
knowing things.

One day I'll know how far I'll go.

April 24, 2022

Wendy Randolph

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