Donny Davis

I sat down to write this on Father’s Day but obviously that didn’t happen. It felt like an appropriate time but I let myself become overwhelmed and afraid to put words down. Then July 2 came and went. That day is special to me as it marked 5 years since Shannon told me that we were having a baby.

I sometimes feel that it’s not ok for me to talk about certain things, such as emotions, because I am a guy. That’s just the environment I grew up in and have always accepted. My dad has tried to get me to open up before but it still felt awkward. However, I feel that it’s time to share some of the emotions that I go through in hopes that it can help others that may be dealing with the same things that I am.

What is it about a blank page that is so intimidating? That little blinking cursor so taunting?

For as long as I can remember I have had this desire to write. I’ve never been good with words or grammar, but for some reason I have this urge to write them down and put my thoughts on paper, or digital canvas. However, whenever I think of writing, my stomach turns into knots and I feel some slight anxiety building up and I shy away from it.

It’s hard to believe that this is it. Last week marked the end of my twelve week journey through The Iron Yard. I’ve spent the last three weeks heads down working on my final project and feel like I can finally come up for some air.

I’m not very good at coming up with ideas for apps, so when it came time to do just that for our final projects I was worried. What could I possibly do to show off what I’ve learned and be able to pull it off in three weeks? Every idea that I came up with just felt unoriginal. Then when I felt like I had a decent idea our instructor told us that he’d like us to have three ideas to present to the class and then narrow it down to one with their input. Somehow I managed to come up with two more ideas that weren’t quite original but had my own spin on them to make them mine.

Well week 8 has come and gone and they lovingly referred to this week as agency week. The design class from the Austin campus shared some designs with us for a mobile app that they had worked on for us to bring it to life. My first thought when looking at the designs was that I could definitely knock out some of them but I wanted to pick one that would challenge what I had learned so far. And challenge me it did.

Since I didn’t get anything written down for weeks six and seven I decided to throw them together here. Both weeks had a strange feeling to me as it marked the halfway point through The Iron Yard program. It was surreal that it was already halfway and then when week seven rolled around I was wondering where week six went. It felt like a blur.

We continued our deep dive into Swift with enums, structs, calculated properties, and optionals oh my. At first I was just throwing question marks and exclamation marks around like they were Halloween candy. After a few more discussions I started to wrangle in my usage of optionals and it started to click why and when to use question marks over exclamation marks. I still goof up on forgetting to unpack the values at times and that always end with a slap on the forehead and a deep sigh.

Better late than never on getting a post in for week five. I can handle the intense learning schedule that we are on but for some reason putting my thoughts down on paper, or digital screen, is so much harder than coding.

In our first four weeks we dove into Objective-C and got a good foundation for iOS development. Objective-C was completely different than the development language that I previously used but it was good to get some hands on time with it. Especially since it is still widely used out in the world. Enough about Objective-C for now though as that’s not the focus of week five. This week we switched gears and started using Swift.

Here we are at the end of week four of our journey through The Iron Yard. I had intentions of writing about my journey thus far but writing intimidates me so I kept putting it off. Then our instructor mentioned this week that he wanted us to be writing about our experience and just like that my hopes of avoiding and putting off writing vanished in a brilliant flash of light. Well the flash of light may have been the lightening from the the thunderstorms rolling through at the moment but it was appropriately timed. So, without further adieu let’s get this thing rolling.