It’s a common fact that in London especially, the way to really attract a crowd is to offer a free bar.
With many places in the west end and the city charging over £5 for a pint (especially those sophisticated European beers in the fancy tall glasses), the opportunity to indulge in some free booze needs to be grasped. But my real motivation for going to General Assembly’s Graduation Evening is to catch up with the tutors and fellow students I met during my recent course in Front End Web Development. Honestly.
I’ve taken up the challenge of moving away print design into the digital field. It’s been at times demanding but it’s been a great experience. It’s generally fun learning new things in any case, but learning to hand code has been particularly enjoyable. It was a part-time course, and I miss the routine of attending the classes on Tuesday/Thursday evenings. Becoming familiar with HTML3, CSS3 and JavaScript has proved tough at times. There is no short-cut and the learning curve has been and will continue to be steep. It’s not easy and sometimes downright confusing, but coding is proving to be incredibly rewarding.
I was completely unaware that programming skill is largely about developing a knack for asking the right questions on Google and knowing which code can be copied and tweaked for your own needs. I’m now in on the big secret: that there is no mastery, there is no final level. The anxiety of feeling lost and stupid is not something you learn to conquer, but something you learn to live with.
I’ve often been up in the early hours trying to work out why my site has broken down due to some stray character or missing digit. Indeed, during the course it soon became evident that no one will ever know everything about a programming language because there’s always more to discover. I’m not sure where this new venture will lead me, but I desperately needed a new challenge.
So tonight will be a good opportunity to see how everyone has moved on since the end of the course which finished around a month ago. The folks at GA are a social lot and I’ve enjoyed a number of nights enjoying their hospitality. The accusation that I’ve been busy recouping much of my course fee drinking at their expense is scandalous….but I fear it has an element of truth.