WHO are you and WHY exactly are you here?

Posted by gnappo1 on May 2, 2017

These are really looong and probably tough questions to fully answer, but for today I guess I’ll just stick to the coding journey. Who am I eh? Well, I’m a regular Italian guy who had his share in big life-changing events and recently added another one to the collection… I got married and moved my entire life almost to the other side of the world, in an awful and always rainy city called… San Diego, California! lol!

Being serious now, it’s a big change and as all the big changes it doesn’t come alone… It comes with a lot of pondering about who you were and who you might like to become, about being able to satisfy new standards and adapt to a totally different culture. Today it’s almost four months that I’m here and all that process of thoughts never stopped a second… Fortunately, for my own sanity, some decisions have also been taken along those deep-thinking roads!

What can give you a good reason to wake up in the morning and get you through the day? What challenge can motivate you the most? What was that thing, some moment in your life, that you felt like “God I wish I had the time, patiance and focus to learn more about this”? Well, my answer to all of the above was and is coding.

Coding and I didn’t always get along, nor we do today or at least, not always… It’s like having the typical brother/sister relationship, where there are time that you can’t even think about it without feeling all sorts of negative feelings (sadness, disappointment, at times hate) and some other times you get along perfectly well, feeling the connetion between the two of you.

Our relationship started at the University of Mathematics in Rome and not in the best way. As in every aspect of life, to fully enjoy something, it’s fundamental when you walk that new road and who shares it with you! Probably it was too early to fully appreciate the extents of what I was learning, or maybe it was just taught without passion, and that rarely leads to anything good. Whether the reason was the former or the latter, it didn’t work out and we didn’t ‘talk’ to each other for some time.

When was the moment that our relationship clicked? When I finally had the time to think and decide by myself, without being forced by a strict curriculum of studies… In that moment the negative feelings turned into curiosity, I made some studies and sent my application to Flatiron.

Of course clumsy as I am, I didn’t realize I had to write a few blog articles until now! It’s been two months of coding by now, full of satisfactions and personal gratifications but also frustration at times. I’m learning how to pick up the daily challenge that coding represents with the right approach, pushing even harder in those days that everything breaks and you have no idea where to start… It’s in those days that I learnt the most, about myself and about coding!