Distractions and Disappointments...

Yesterday was a roller coaster of a day for me personally. I received some disappointing news from my daughter's mother. The conversation I had with her altered my focus to the point where I so distracted from the task at hand (which was my jQuery home work), that I wasn't able to do anything.

Which bring me to my next point...

It is so important to remove any and all distractions prior to attempting to do something like TIY. I have been preparing to come to TIY for over 7 months. Months of savings and getting as many things in my personal life squared away as possible. I knew that once I arrived here the ONLY thing I would be able to focus on/deal with would be TIY. That all fell apart on yesterday :S

I ended up starting on my Homework around 8PM and was up until the wee hours getting it done. (Which is why I'm sorry to say I didn't make a post yesterday.) When I finished my work I decided to write a blog post, even though I was dog tired. Anyways, I looked at the clock and realized that midnight had come and gone.

When I woke up this morning I felt like I lost a day, and felt that I was slightly behind. There is no doubt that I would have been further along had I not allowed myself to be distracted. I was so angry with myself for losing focus - even if it was only for 8 hours or so. I have worked to hard and sacrificed to much to be here to allow anything to get me off track. I made a commitment to myself to do everything in my power to never allow myself to get pulled away from the mission.

Yes my homework was completed and turned in on time. However I know that I could have and would have turned in something 10 times better had I not been in the dumps for nearly half the day!

I hope that you are staying the course, and reaching for your own goals in your life. I encourage you to move towards what you want with all your might, if you get knocked down, take a breath, get back up and keep pushing towards your goal. That is exactly what I feel like I am doing here at TIY everyday.

I am starting to feel the burn now...

Yesterday we started working with jQuery, which I have never used in depth prior. Our homework assignment was to use the API from a major ecommerce site and recreate a page from their site. We were going to use everything that we had learned up to that point to make it happen: HTML/CSS/Sass/jQuery. (we also were introduced to JSON - I just can't recall if that was yesterday or the class before).

Today we were introduced to Underscore.js and will be using it to us complete our Homework. We're tasked with using a API to recreate a web page that is filled with dynamic data. (I just used one sentence to describe what I could have written a entire blog post about. It's a bit more involved than I described here) Tonight's homework is the biggest project we have had yet, we have 5 days to complete it. I am feeling a tad nervous, but I feel confident that I will get it done.

It is so crazy to think that just two weeks ago words like: Gulp, JSON, JavaScript, jQuery, CDNs, Git, GitHub, Commit/Push, Object, Traversing etc. meant very little. Now they are a regular part of my vocabulary.

Time is flying by! I can't believe that by the end of this week we'll be 25% of the way through the program. It is amazing how much I am able to learn by being here and doing this full-time. I have learned more in the past 2 weeks than I did in the 3 months prior trying to figure stuff out while juggling all the responsibilities of my life. One blessing of TIY is while here (at least for me) it feel like my life has been paused. The only thing I have to do is eat, sleep, and breath code. I have no other responsibilities. No baby, no girlfriend or dates :( no going to work, no hanging out with friends, no tinkering around the house, no nothing. Just code - and every one around me is doing the same thing. There is something magical about the environment that they have created here. It is truly something that should be experienced, I don't have the words to give justice to what is happening here right now.

Anyways I gotta get back to my homework,

Until next time...