Humble Rookie Says Thank You

[marquezc329]

The moment of truth....

"user@host ~$ sudo parse config.lua"

And with this, the first functional 319 lines of code (aka parse) I've ever written, charge into my bare-bones implementation of a terminal based theme-manager for the Awesome Window Manager.

Blank stares from my girlfriend as I rejoice in the successful run resulted from the hours and days and nights of work on this project. The hundreds of pages and internet posts read through. The endless wall of warnings reminding me about this comma, or that semi-colon, that I forgot to add while my eyes battled sleep in the hours after midnight. Telling myself I just need 10 more minutes as the sun rises outside the window and I'm still trying to figure out where the heck the data from that hash really wound up. It all seems worth it in that moment.

I just wanted to say thank you to all the monks here at the Monastery contributing to the learning of others. It is here that I learned how to greet the world with print "hello world!\n";, and it is here that I read, and tried, and failed, and read more. These 319 lines of frustration and lightbulbs clicking on, torment and accomplishment, and failures and failures and failures, and success are my offering to the Monastery. From "Hello World", to hashes of arrays of hashes and multi-line regular expressions, I have you to thank. I have miles and years and tens of thousands of pages and posts to go, but it is my humble and hard-fought beginning.

To other Rookies fighting the good fight for no paycheck, and no homework assignment, learning for no purpose other than the great puzzle of it all, I say: You can do it too... All it takes is energy drinks and Seekers of Perl Wisdom.

Thank you all so much for your selfless contributions, words of advice and hours of experience shared with myself and others. The quality of this community is unsurpassed

-marquezc329

[sundialsvc4]

The first program that I ever wrote:   was 8 lines long, took me six months to write (in BASIC), and had a bug in it.   Welcome to the infatuation.   I’ve never looked back, nor wanted to.

[space_monk]

Hmm how times have changed. The first program(s) I wrote were a 6502 monitor and a "pong" type game for an Acorn Atom (BBC Micro predecessor)