Do you know what happens when you let two years go by without touching a single line of intricate code? You have to really dig deep to bring all that you knew back to the surface. You have to dig deep and scan the secluded archives of your brain and make sense of the fragmentary information that remains. By any means necessary, you find methods to fuse all of that together again and you allow the potential of all the opportunities that would stem from that fusion to fuel your motivation and more importantly, your self-discipline.
I currently work as an Automation Engineer where I use Java to write code that automates test cases. It was a challenging readjustment to revisit Java programming, but once I did, coding and debugging gets me all excited again. There’s a lot that I still have to unlearn and relearn, a lot to merge and separate, but by participating in the 100 Days of Code challenge, I hope to fill in those gaps and give myself the opportunity to strengthen my skills.
For the last few nights, I spent about 4 hours writing code to automate test cases I had written for Facebook since it has similar functionality as the software I interface with at work. I started by trying to code the following tasks:
1. Login to Facebook
2. Validate Account Information based on username & password entered
3. Navigate to User Profile
4. Validate Navigation to User Profile
For the rest of this week, I’ll work on fully automating the login functionality, cleaning up this code a bit, and finishing up my workspace. I’ve decided to start keeping track of my progress here so I can have a point of reference when I need it. Just a few days into this challenge and I feel like that 13-year-old girl who taught herself HTML & CSS all over again. And while my life has changed significantly (because adulthood and parenthood), I plan to put in as much effort as I can.
To all my non-techies, find something you want to get better at and do it for 100 days consecutively. Then seek out people who are doing what you love so that you remain motivated and inspired to keep going. You’d be amazed at how easy it is to form healthy and beneficial habits by just devoting an hour of your day to it.
