This too shall pass.

Heya,
College is no place to chill and be laid back as shown in movies. The reality is that it is more challenging than school with peer pressure being no stranger to us.
Being a newbie in the tech domain, and being a girl, I felt the gender gap and the intimidation newbies like me go through when we see legit programmers who flaunt their skills and make it obvious that they exactly know what they are doing.
But along with all this ranting, for all the newbies out there, remember that this phase too shall pass and its not as scary as it seems (I kept convincing myself).
Always start with something easy and take baby steps, one good coding language to start with would be python, as it is more understandable and less intimidating and complex-looking than languages like C and C++.
I still struggle, but there are times when it gave me great joy like the time I developed an app with Flutter or when I managed to grab a free tee from hacktoberfest 2019.
Stay home and Stay safe buddy ;)
P.S: If you a dev and want some cool swags check the website devswag, you won't be disappointed :)

I am a good person. I can even say I am a good programmer. I have worked hard to get where I am and that shows perseverance. Although, where I am right now is not what I expected, I am somewhere. I can do something. I have good intentions.

Someday, I will build software which will be used by millions of people around the interwebs. And they will love me, for I will have made their lives better....in some way. Some will even consider paying me for it. Not because the well placed and non intrusive donate button I put there, but out of pure adoration and bare necessity to preserve someone as brilliant and precious as me. I shall be the definition of success. But I long for neither adoration nor wealth, for I am humble or at least that is how I will be perceived.

Like flies to the honey my success will attract big evil corporations to acquire my business. And I shall spit on their wretched face....at first. I would like to be wooed. Such display of integrity shall inspire generations of programmers. Let ye be inspired. There will be those who envy my achievements and they will be mocked and shunned by my true believers. But being the kind soul that I am, I will bring back my minions, for it could a PR nightmare.

All these events will take place in a not too distant future. Sure, I am going through a dark time now, it will pass. 'tis nothing but me transitioning from a lame ass PHP coder moth to this totally badass software engineer who is also a cool bro. This eclipse of my brain shall pass. My neurons will fire in all directions like photons from the sun during late winter, for it may overheat and we definitely don't want that.

I pray to the gods of engineering to grant my wishes. Trust me guys, you will be thanking yourselves when donate my money to charities that will help me set up. But that's another scheme. Amen.

My dummy test will never be the same again!

This too shall pass.

It may pass like a turd sized kidney stone.

But it will.

After three months of development, my first contribution to the client is going live on their servers in less than 12 hours. And let me say, I shall never again be doing that much programming in one go, because the last week and a half has been a nightmare... Where to begin...

So last Monday, my code passed to our testing servers, for QA to review and give its seal of approval. But the server was acting up and wouldn't let us do much, giving us tons of timeouts and other errors, so we reported it to the sysadmin and had to put off the testing.

Now that's all fine and dandy, but last Wednesday we had to prepare the release for 4 days of regression testing on our staging servers, which meant that by Wednesday night the code had to be greenlight by QA. Tuesday the sysadmin was unable to check the problem on our testing servers, so we had to wait to Wednesday.

Wednesday comes along, I'm patching a couple things I saw, and around lunch time we deploy to the testing servers. I launch our fancy new Postman tests which pass in local, and I get a bunch of errors. Partially my codes fault, partially the testing env manipulating server responses and systems failing.

Fifteen minutes before I leave work on the day we have to leave everything ready to pass to staging, I find another bug, which is not really something I can ignore. My typing skills go to work as I'm hammering line after line of code out, trying to get it finished so we can deploy and test when I get home. Done just in time to catch the bus home...

So I get home. Run the tests. Still a couple failures due to the bug I tried to resolve. We ask for an extension till the following morning, thus delaying our deployment to staging. Eight hours later, at 1AM, after working a full 8 hours before, I push my code and leave it ready for deployment the following morning. Finally, everything works and we can get our code up to staging. Tests had to be modified to accommodate the shitty testing environment, but I'm happy that we're finally done there.

Staging server shits itself for half a day, so we end up doing regression tests a full day late, without a change in date for our upload to production (yay...).

We get to staging, I run my tests, all green, all working, so happy. I keep on working on other stuff, and the day that we were slated to upload to production, my coworkers find that throughout the development (which included a huge migration), code was removed which should not have. Team panics. Everyone is reviewing my commits (over a hundred commits) trying to see what we're missing that is required (especially legal requirements). Upload to production is delayed one day because of this. Ended up being one class missing, and a couple lines of code, which is my bad (but seriously, not bad considering I'm a Junior who was handed this project as his first task at his first job).

I swear to God, from here on out, one feature per branch and merge request. Never again shall I let this happen. I don't even know why it was allowed to happen, it breaks our branch policies. But ohel... I will now personally oppose crap like this too...

Now if you'll excuse me... I'm going to be highly unproductive and rest, because I might start balding otherwise after these weeks...

while(true) {
$us->me();
}

Damn it. I'm stuck on an infinite loop and can't get out. I'm starting to feel unmotivated on our first project as a team. No financial support from client. Disastrous planning phase. I really do want to drop this project. But I won't because of my dev friends, we started this together. Another thing that frustrates me, they don't know how to use Git. If there are changes on the system, we have to transfer it through flash drive. [ill teach them]. I don't wanna go to the point that this project becomes toxic. So frustrating. This too shall pass.

Does every start have to be this hard and frustrating?