It was 9:28pm on Thursday, March 5th. I had just spent two hours debugging one seemingly simple exercise. The code worked. The output looked perfect. But the tests kept failing because of spaces that were apparently invisible to me. Spaces. I wanted to quit. Clearly this was a stupid idea. What made me think I should even try this? Stay in your lane, Connelly.
Instead, I worked through it. I fixed it.
A week ago, I'd never written a line of code. Now I've built three simple working programs and learned the most important skill in coding: not quitting when nothing makes sense.
Sunday, March 1st I began my yearlong project, 365 Documented. It’s intended to be an epic art project whereby I teach myself a valuable new skill (learning to code), build a product with this skill, and build an audience through documenting the entire thing publicly on Twitter (@365Documented).
So last Sunday evening,I took the plunge and opened freeCodeCamp for the first time. "Introduction to JavaScript." Variables. Data types. Let vs const. I thought I understood it. The lessons made sense. I completed four of them. Checked the box in my spreadsheet. Day 1 complete. This seemed manageable.
Tuesday brought the first "workshop" lesson of my course: "Build a Greeting Bot." First time writing code that actually does something. And of course, I got stuck on Step 1. The instructions said: type console.log("Hi there!"). I stared at it for ten minutes. What did it REALLY mean? The answer: just type the damn line. It worked. First essential lesson: of coding: stop overthinking simple things.
Wednesday. Long day at work and toddler care. Past my bedtime. Wanted to skip. Opened the laptop anyway. "Build a Trivia Bot." Trial and error for an hour. Code wouldn't run. Found the typos. Fixed them. It worked. Resisted the urge to ask Claude for help. Figured it out. Logged it at 10pm. Day 4 complete.
Thursday. "Build a Sentence Maker." Create variables. (noun, adjective, verb, noun2, adjective2, etc.). Concatenate strings. Output stories to console. Create wacky Mad Libs. Easy, right?
Wrong.
The code worked. I saw the output: "Once upon a time, there was a jolly hammer who loved to eat hornets." Perfect. But the tests failed. "Pay attention to spaces.", advised my freeCodeCamp digital tutor.
What spaces???
I checked. Rechecked. Changed things. Broke it worse. Fixed it. Tests still failed. Two hours. I found them eventually: missing space after "was", extra space between console.log and the opening parenthesis, no space between variables in the template string.
Yep, SPACES. Invisible to my eye. Preventing my passing the otherwise simple exercise.
At 11:28pm, I got the green checkmark. I didn't celebrate. I was too annoyed. But I finished, dammit.
After my first week, I’ve realized that coding isn't as much about being smart as it is about being precise and persistent. One missing space causes the complete failure of an otherwise perfectly written program. You can't approximate. You can't "close enough" your way through. The computer doesn't care about your intentions. It reads exactly what you wrote, completely free of bias and emotion.
That's just how it is, and I know I had better come to grips with that cold reality or this project is doomed before it even begins.
Turns out, 90% of coding is finding tiny mistakes. The skill isn't writing perfect code the first time. It's finding what's wrong when it doesn't work. Needle in haystack. This takes longer than I expected. It's more frustrating than I expected. It's also essential to success.
Week 1 taught me:
Showing up matters much more than understanding everything.
Precision matters much more than speed.
Working through issues until completion is the real skill I am strengthening.
I am NOT a natural coder (to no one's surprise). But that's partially why I am doing this excruciating exercise. It's so far out of my comfort zone that it HAS to promote rapid, dynamic growth. It's forcing my brain to work in a very different manner than any other activity I've ever pursued. It's stretching me in real time.
I'm one week into this art project. I have 51 left. I know there are many more days like Thursday to come. Long days. Late nights. Frustrating exercises. Invisible problems that make no sense. I also know I'll figure them out, one by one.
Because if I can survive two hours debugging spaces I can't see, I can survive anything this journey throws at me.