Five weeks in and class has settled into a daily cycle that is moving more rapidly than some of our brains can handle, but it seems that we’re all getting used to it and doing what we have to in order to discover our own best patterns of learning and stay on top of the material. We probably learn three or four major concepts per class and it seems that we’re all on board for the first one, most of us follow the second, a few will get the third and Jeff (our teacher) just throws the fourth one out for us to start thinking about it. We start off each day with a review and come out of the weeds just long enough to see the light and then by the end of class we’re right back in. It’s happened just about every class in the last five weeks that we’ll be talking after class about something we learned that day and one of us will say (usually me), “That was just this morning we learned that?”. Each day is a long drive that goes by in a blur and when we stop the scenery we passed at the beginning of the day seems a long way away.

At first this cycle caused me some anxiety that I wasn’t “getting it” or keeping up, but the lessons from the books I’ve mentioned, Apprenticeship Patterns and Mindfulness in Plain English, have allowed me to enjoy the daily trips in and out of the weeds. Not knowing something or getting it right away means that it’s a challenge. The other important piece (that I mentioned in my last post) is just accepting that I might not get it right the first time- and that’s o.k. Screwing up is part of the process, and it’s the challenges and this process that I’m learning to love. This week I also came across this great video about Joel Bukiewicz, a writer turned knifemaker, and these words really stuck (pardon the language):

You go into the shop and you cut yourself, you burn yourself, you fuck stuff up, you ruin something you worked on for like three weeks— and you never make that mistake again.

So this is how I learned, and so those things, are the same with writing and knife making. It just takes buckets of blood and sweat and fucking work to get there. That’s it. To get good, to get competent—and then once you become competent maybe you have it in you to become an artist, maybe you don’t.

Before you get to a place where you can actually make art with the skills that you learn you have to sort of master these basics. Mastering the basics takes, they say 10,000 hours, it’s like five years of 40 hours weeks. I’d say it’s probably more like 15,000 hours. So it takes a lot of work to get there and then when you get there that’s day one. Then you can start and maybe be making something you can call art.

Learning anything new takes work. There are times I’m going to screw up, but those mistakes are valuable experiences. The Ruby language in particular is well suited to teach through the mistakes. Each error message will tell me exactly what went wrong and where to look for the problem.

But the bigger reason these words stuck is because after just the first couple weeks of class I found myself drawn to the path of software craftsmanship. The first question on the Code Academy application was “Why are you applying to Code Academy?” and part of my reply was that, “I come from a family of tradesman—electricians, plumbers, carpenters—and there is a deep part of me that yearns to wake up in the morning, focus on the task of building something, do the best job I possibly can and then being able to take a step back and say, ‘I made that’.” So the idea of being a software craftsman — of constantly learning and building and sometimes breaking things to learn a lesson— sounds pretty good to me… even if I do have 14,700 hours to go.