Yesterday I listened to the first episode of the CodeNewbie podcast. It was an interview with Carlos Lazo. The interviewer asked him, “What’s one thing you wish you knew earlier in your coding journey?” Carlos said, “That we’re paid to be frustrated.” I thought that was insightful and helpful, especially as I begin my journey through this bootcamp.

Yesterday we dove into Git and GitHub, then we were assigned a group project, creating a website collaboratively. After groups were assigned and we sat down together, I felt overwhelmed by the task before us. It was due in four days. We barely understood how to create branches, push and fetch through the Terminal, and we were working with classmates who we had only met four days prior.

Carlos’ phrase kept coming to mind. “Paid to be frustrated.” So many people have been telling me over and over that frustration is part of this journey. We’ll be paid to solve and fix problems. It will feel confusing. Like I’m in the dark. And then I’ll be taking a shower, for example, not thinking about coding, and the lights will suddenly go on.

I had that experience this morning. Last night I decided to go home and relax. Be with my family. Not think about Git and what I didn’t understand. This morning I managed to wake up early enough to spend an hour learning Git on CodeAcademy. And before I knew it, the lights were going on. Conceptually it was making sense. I went to my terminal, created a few branches and files. Staged and committed them. Then made a few changes in the branch and merged them with the master branch. Success! It felt good. It reminded me to just persist. Just keep going, and eventually it will make sense.