Finishing this website has been a long time coming, just a few days shy of two years. I restarted the Learn Enough to Be Dangerous course the second or third day after I got home from the hospital when I broke my leg. When I got to the Git tutorial I decided to read ProGit, which is advertised on Git’s own documentation website. Didn’t understand more than 15% of it. Just enough to be dangerous, in the spirit of what I’m being taught.

After a month I was back to the CSS and Layout tutorial. I took notes this time, which is largely why it took me several months to finish the project. This was without any real programming, mind you. Next was the introduction to JavaScript. I did the first 4 or 5 chapters and didn’t retain much of anything. When it let us loose to do our first solo program to do something using a loop, I could not recall anything. I went back to the beginning of the JavaScript tutorial and took notes for that one, too. It helped immensely for retention.

I got to the introduction to functions and functional programming, and I did not understand how function names were largely symbolic, and were only important for human readability. Just confused the fuck out of me. Like, I could not continue the tutorial because I could not comprehend how to write custom functions. Even writing that out, it makes me sound dumb as a brick. Oh well, worse things to not comprehend than how to write functions. I sought some guidance on Discord and decided to do Mozilla Development Network’s JavaScript Guide. It made a difference, and after I was done all those lessons I was able to grasp enough of the remainder of Learn Enough’s JS tutorial to finish the sections on making a Node package and using Node Package Manager to upload and download Node packages for use in custom scripts.

When I got to the last section of the tutorial, the part where we finish the photo gallery stub created at the end of the CSS tutorial, I was locked out of my GitHub account because I had put off implementing two-factor authentication bullshit.

Again, typing this makes me question my intelligence and determination, but it took me pretty much three months to finally solve it and get accesss to GitHub, and then Heroku, for web applications, because of course it would be required for Heroku.

I just really hope that the people trying to hack all our shit and phish our passwords have even a fraction of a percent of the trouble I had trying to set up two-factor authentication. Wait, isn’t two-factor authentication supposed to be harder (impossible?) to phish credentials for? I can’t even recall anymore.

So now, in my own time, I can continue with Learn Enough’s Ruby tutorial, and then Ruby on Rails, assuming that by the time I get to it the tutorial’s not severely outdated.

It’s been a journey, but I persist despite knowing less and less the more I learn.