I feel all aspects of life are like programming and engineering. Gardening you have to pick where you are going to garden. What you are going to garden and how you will organize it. How will you water it and what nutrients you will give it to keep it growing? I’ve also learned in this short time of programming that there will always be road blocks and you have to find enjoyment in trying to navigate around them.
Rock climbing would be a way more complex program than gardening. You have so many choices on where to climb. What style of climbing from trad, bouldering, soloing, sport and mixed. Then there is the prepping of what gear you need to bring. What food and water you will need? What kind of survival gear you will need if something goes wrong? Then you have to discover the approach to the cliff. Then there is the climbing. You have to know where on the rock you are going. How you execute it. Weather or not you will be doing multiple belay or if its single pitch stuff where you can stay on the ground. Then the really hard part. The puzzle of how to climb it.
Writing a program is ever changing. And the tools to do so are also ever changing. So, in part I feel most things in my life are like programming and engineering and that is why I have chosen this as a career. I love the problem solving and puzzles. I tend to gravitate towards things that challenge me and keep me learning.
Going into the first project I was worried I had not retained enough information to get through it. I feel the project went fairly easily. I had some hurdles like getting the API to communicate using my private key. Once I got to the second level of printing out information about the plants I found that it was just too much data display at once so I decided I would take it a bit farther and separate out that information. Upon making a nested while loop to accomplish this I cause many endless loops and ended up having to do a lot of troubleshooting.
I also feel after this project I got a lot more comfortable with VS Code and github which had given me so many issues in the beginning. Now that it is familiar, I am learning to like it a lot and am quite happy with how VS Code works. I also found an addon for VS Code called GitLens that makes working with Github really easy.
I felt really excited once I started getting it working. Now that it is fully functional and I cleaned up some of the leftover code it looks really nice and has given me great joy knowing I was able to make it work without very much help.