Yesterday was fine. I watched the training video, following along while taking enough time to pause and try a few things on my own. I thought, “I can do this,” and, “This is amazing.”
Today is scary again. I downloaded a report that I use in my normal work and have been trying to manipulate it like I would to get the data I need for my team.
I ended the day with 32 lines of working code, so, not bad, right? After 4 hours? There are some blank lines in there, too. That feels pretty good.
The challenge for me is the time it takes to do something so trivial–something that would take me 3 clicks in Excel. I needed to delete a blank line at the top of the data frame–it took me more than half an hour of searching the internet and trying different ways of phrasing my question–and a hint from a co-worker–to figure out the line of code I needed. It’ll be fast in the future, but the learning curve is painful.
I also learned that I learn differently from my husband. He loves coding and is mostly self-taught–he has no problem diving into the internet to find documentation and learn new functions. For me, I’m much more of an auditory learner than a reader, and I need a bit of hands-on to get something to stick. Once I’ve learned it, or had it explained to me, I’ll remember it forever. But reading documentation and copying someone else’s formulas is a hard way for me to learn. It’s much harder for me to understand what I’m actually doing that way. I’ll need to find a better way to learn this, I think, if I want to be most effective.
Still, I think it’s going to be awesome. I’m ready to be the world’s greatest HR Analyst someday.