I am tempted to begin this week’s coding blog with a list of thank-you’s that could rival an Academy Award winner’s acceptance speech. Perhaps that is because I just got home from the Piston’s game, where Chauncey Billups’s jersey was retired in a halftime full of speeches of congratulations and gratitude, but I digress… This week, I figured out how to make my previous blog posts appear on my website (thank you, Scott). I submitted my first pull requests, which I am fairly certain were successful (thank you, Diana). And, most exciting of all, I had the first real “a-ha!” moments of my coding experience working in small groups on the Dailies (all the thank yous to Diana, Aden, David, and Nathaniel).

One thing I really appreciate about this class is the sense of camaraderie. Everyone, from those with minimal experience like me to the professional programmers in the room, is in the trenches together, figuring out how to render thoughts into words and JavaScript. I’m glad for the collaboration-friendly attitude fostered in class meetings and on Slack. Working through the logic of arrays and loops in lab last week, I thought about how algebra was my favorite year of math class in school…and about how I haven’t taken a formal math class in close to a decade. It’s striking and difficult to articulate how much coding feels simultaneously within my range of understanding and wholly alien. Learning something this far outside of my wheelhouse feels a little less daunting/incomprehensible thanks to the strong prevailing team atmosphere. The cheer that went up in the 9th floor computer lab when Aden, Diana, and I got our rocket to blast off a week ago and today when David graciously helped us clinch the final step to making 500 bubbles float gloriously across the screen—it may have startled nearby faculty members. It certainly felt more significant because of the collective effort than it would have if by some good fortune I had been able to produce those results alone in my office.