We’re wrapping up Week Four at Code Academy (eight to go for your scorecards at home) and I’m still learning new things by the minute. Most of it is programming related and can range from the importance of a properly placed comma to breaking down the best way to solve a problem. But changing paths and doing something entirely new also means I’m learning much bigger lessons.

The other night I attended the Software Craftsmen’s Night Out (stepping out of my shell is a whole separate post) and I was sitting at a table with three guys who had each been developing professionally for about ten years. They asked me how Code Academy was going and I told them how there would be days where I felt like I had a good grasp on everything and I was “getting it” and then the next day I’d learn something new and be totally lost. It’s a weekly rollercoaster but I’m enjoying myself. They said that it was a good thing I was enjoying myself because that’s pretty much the same ride they’d been on their entire careers. They were always coming across new challenges that not only kept the job interesting (and caused the occasional headache) but it forced them to grow and continually learn new things. Matt Polito of Hashrocket (and formerly Groupon and Obtiva) came in and spoke to our class this past week and shared a similar sentiment. He said that although he’d been programming professionally for a number of years that he still felt like he was an intermediate coder and whenever he looked at past work he was unhappy with it because he was continually getting better. He encouraged us to get into a constant cycle of learning, to try new things and don’t worry that it’s going to be crap- just do it and push it Github for the world to see.

And then over the past few days it all came together and this wonderful Ira Glass quote hit home for me.

I came across it over the summer and passed it along to @rsanmarchi as encouragement to get all of her wonderful ideas out of that beautiful head of hers and out to the world. Then it popped up again when Mike and Neal included it in our Code Academy handbook. I like the quote because I pretty much like anything Ira Glass does, but mostly because it says much more poignantly what Nike has been telling us for years: “Just Do It”.

At Code Academy we really are just doing it. My classmates and I are staying for hours after class and coming in on the weekends to help each other build basic programs that practice everything we learn. Sometimes we punch in lines of code that seem to make no sense whatsoever but we’re leaning to just let ‘em rip. If we fire up our app and get an error message we’re learning that it’s no big deal because more often than not it will tell us how to fix it.

The apps are simple, ugly and don’t come anywhere close to the apps that we’re dreaming of in our heads. If anyone outside of the programming world would see what we’re doing right now they probably wouldn’t be that impressed. But you know what? Each time we build something it gets a little bit better, and a little closer to that vision in our heads—and that progress feels great. If I was to judge the app against what I dream of building then I might think to myself, “wow, this kind of sucks”. But you know what? Kind of sucks is awesome right now. I’ve only been coding for a grand total of 27 days now and if I want to be a developer I know that I’ve got many years of suck to look forward to—Ira, Matt and the guys a the meet-up told me so— and I couldn’t be more excited.