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Spent today finishing up my first assignments coded with PHP. It’s interesting to me how the expectations have evolved. I’m getting to the point that, even though I’ve never done anything in PHP, that I can look at existing code and decipher its intent, then adjust the code accordingly. I did need some of my instructor’s “hints”, but not much. It was pretty cool to be able to just read my text, open up the code, and tweak it to get the desired results. Again, this is the first chapter of the book, my first set of projects, so still pretty basic. But, I’m feeling more confident as a coder every day.

This is balanced with moments of complete bewilderment. Over the course of one project, I had several moments where I just wanted to scream at my screen. One moment, trying to get some if/elseif statements to work. After the better part of an hour, I finally deleted the whole thing and re-coded it…and it worked! I haven’t any idea what I did differently. That’s one of the things with code: a wrong letter case, dropping one character, one symbol, and the whole thing will not work.

Getting it to work is an amazing feeling. Balanced by the frustrations of the damn thing not working at all.