As a child, I used to train myself in the ways of the force.  My dentist used to give me bouncy-balls for good behaviour and I used to take them, sit on the soft carpet in my room, close my eyes, throw the bouncy-balls against my oddly-contoured dresser, and use the force to catch them as they bounced back.  Needless to say, I never became a Jedi Knight.  But maybe it was because I never have a Jedi mentor?

Today I met my Dev Bootcamp mentors – John Gesimondo and Dom Kiva-Meyer.  This week I worked mostly with John, and after hearing his awesome journey from business student to San Fran coder I suggested we code the infamous “Battleship” assignment.  I outlined my approach and John and I sat down to begin coding!  When I started repeating myself, John would jump in and save the day.  When I was heading into a dark and scary hole, John would point it out and happily lead me away.  For now, I can only explain his foresight and intuition as something akin to the force.  We didn’t finish even a quarter of the assignment, but just from watching him set up his methods, debug, and write out his thought processes really showed me a dimension of coding I never got exposed to before.

As mysterious as John’s powers might be, I know that there’s only one way to get there – practice.  And to immerse myself in the force.  As another teacher of mine once said, “Do or do not.  There is no try.”