Update

I do still have thoughts on my latest topics, but work was kind of a pain today so I'll probably do it tomorrow.

I... I have a love/hate relationship with coding. I hate the struggle (more on that in a bit), but it is a pretty great feeling when you figure out how to make it work.

That said, there's a reason I applied for the technical engineering position, and not as a developer. 

Some of the industry changes mean those roles may converge a bit (I'll spare you the details).

Anyways. When I first started here, about a year and a half ago, I got tapped for one of the attempts at transitioning to those new roles. 

And it's been an experience. 

Its not so much that coding is hard... It's just that when you're new it's like you hit roadblock after roadblock. 

We use special tools that can help error check as we code, but setting up your environment is a task all by itself. 

See, we all get the basic functions when we install a programming language, but there are a lot of tools that have already been coded to help with more specialized work. 

A university might regularly use specialized math formulas. A company that offers up an app for your phone might use some other functions. If we tried installing all of the possible coding resources we'd be wasting a lot of computer resources on things we never use. 

So you install the particular packages, modules, libraries, etc. Just the ones you need. (there are ways of documentating that and ensuring everything is installed, but a) sometimes you need to install something else first and b) some things get missed. 

Which means that this week I first couldn't even run the code I was interested in. Not in my IDE at least. 

I had to install something else entirely (which was a pain figuring out). 

Then I ran into a different issue, though I resolved that one pretty quickly. 

Only for something else to appear... 

All before I really coded anything. 

I know, I know. Once you get setup it gets easier.

There's a lot more to it, and it's been rather frustrating. Especially since (as my team and boss are all integration engineers) I can't really ask them for help.

But I worked with someone today who definitely knew a lot more, and got a lot closer to where I need to be. (He couldn't help with everything, and was suggesting I just create a local project to test with. It's just that doing that means cutting out all the parts specifical to our code base. Maybe a more experienced programmer could quickly and easily do it. Idk, but the developer who's been the most help was able to point me in the right direction. That one was a fairly easy fix, and I'm pretty much ready for business.

Or rather, finished the day researching how to do what I want, and hopefully Monday I can actually get it done. 

This, btw, reminds me of the training I got sent to about a year ago. We were covering some of the tools for testing your code, and I commented that there was a world of difference between the coding we learned in school and the tools we were using (junit, gradle, maven, ummm... I don't even remember everything tbh).

Like, it's great that I understand for loops and while loops and try/catch statements and functions and all that. But I think it would have been nice to have an entire course on IDEs, and how to set them up. I'm sure I'm only using a fraction of the resources in my current one.

The funny thing about that training though. Most of the other people there were developers, and a) one flat out said they were never taught this stuff in school either. And just had to figure it out. (part of why I think IT does a horrible job at teaching newbies) and b) I somehow seemed to understand more than some?

Like... It's mostly just asking questions from anyone willing to spare a moment, googling the crap out of things, and persisting... 

But everyone else at that training seemed to struggle too, and I seemed to pick up some things better. 

And even though I just spent an entire blog post complaining about this, I probably know more about all of this than the others working on this project (mostly because the developer I go to for help used to be on the team, and wrote most of it, so I've somewhat poorly been filling in for him now that he's not there.)

It kind of makes me think all of us are just faking it. (Exaggeration. Slightly.)

All the talk from infosec Twitter about imposter syndrome might even be endemic to tech. 

I'm not sure how I feel about that.