New Roller Coasters

Unsurprisingly, my first day and a half of looking at actual SurveyMonkey code and trying to figure out how everything worked was a new roller coaster. It went something like this:

1. This is terrifying.
2. It's cool. It will just take a little while to get familiar with their code.
3. Look, curly braces and functions and stuff. I know how to do this. It's cool.
4. It's cool. There are only like 100 files that interact with each other and I have no idea how.
5. OH MY GOD there are like 100 files that interact with each other and I have no idea how!
6. What are all these weird functions that I've never heard of????
7. It's ok. We're just going to google some things and see what we can find out.
8. WHY DOESN'T GOOGLE KNOW WHAT THIS FUNCTION IS???
9. I thought I knew JavaScript, but clearly I don't.
10. I forgot how to computer!!
11. Ok, I will ask my mentor for some help.
12. Wait, you're telling me that a lot of this code is specific to the SurveyMonkey framework?
13. Wait, it would be super weird if I were able to figure this out on my own?
14. Wait, it takes all new people a while to learn the ins and outs of your MVC framework?
15. Oh, that's what that stands for? Oh, that's where that function is coming from?
16. Ok! I can maybe look at the code on my own and understand some things.
17. So what happens if I comment this out?
18. OMG IT RUNS!!!
19. Ok, so why doesn't this section work?
20. I am amazing. Look at me, coding and stuff.
21. WTF? Why doesn't this work?

The rest was mostly me narrowing in on what part of the code was throwing an error. And then I went home for the weekend. Want to hear something really shocking? At no point this week did I cry or feel like crying. There were times when I was a little panicked or felt kinda stupid, but I didn't have any breakdowns. It's not because I am a good enough programmer that I am past those breakdowns. It's that I have learned that this is hard and I am smart and I have resources. I'm sure there will still be breakdowns, but I don't anticipate them happening regularly anymore. 

Just like I felt at Hackbright, I feel like right now I am exactly where I am supposed to be.