[self reflect]; Week 4

It is now Week 4 at The Iron Yard and what you see above shows a small  glimpse into the vast amount of information I have been exposed to in Objective-C in such a short period of time.  Just this week I have learned how to work with multiple entities in Core Data, create custom cells in a TableView, solve coding problems in a short period of time (Code Kata), make a cipher to gain a glimpse into the world of encryption coding, and create a simple To do application.

Now the code above I’m convinced isn’t the best way to make my point, but I think it adequately showcases where I am and maybe in the coming weeks this code will hopefully improve my point while also streamlining how much is needed to accomplish the same point. Tune in to find out.

There is a saying I would often use when people asked me how much Mandarin I knew while living in China (Context: My wife and I lived for three years in China serving the Deaf community). I would respond, “I knew enough to be dangerous.”  This meant I might appear new to the language to many but I knew enough to thrive in the tasks I needed to accomplish each day.

I believe this is also applicable in describing my knowledge of Objective-C to this point.  Just like with Mandarin my wife and I were dropped into a cross-cultural situation with no English to rely on and we had to swim and learn in order to thrive in our new home and work.  Each day we tried harder and each day we got better at buying groceries, paying utility bills, and making life work there.

The same has been true at The Iron Yard these past four weeks.  I have been tossed into a situation that has been foreign to me and have been encouraged, motivated, and forced to adapt in order to thrive.  My instructor, Jeff Ligon, has been awesome at encouraging me and the rest of the students to keep trying to drink from the fire hose of information thrown at us. In that analogy I see that not all of the water is going to go down, but I’m convinced this challenge, though right now it seems unreasonable will make me able to accept not just bigger challenges in the future but also make me appreciate how easy it can be to drink from the faucet of day to day Objective-C coding that will become familiar to me because of this time of trial.

“The gem cannot be polished without friction, nor man perfected without trials.” – Chinese Proverb

“Consider it pure joy, my brothers and sisters, whenever you face trials of many kinds, because you know that the testing of your faith produces perseverance. Let perseverance finish its work so that you may be mature and complete, not lacking anything.” – James 1:2-4

This weekend I have been paired up with two students to make a forecast app that finds a city based on the user inputting the zip code and then the app will retrieve the forecast for that city.  I look forward to sharing that experience on Monday. Be blessed.