Terribly caffeinated and full of trepidation at my self-perceived lack of quantitative skills, I made my first go yesterday, for about an hour, at the Python coding tutorial. Maybe I have tried too hard to forget the introduction to coding course I took during my undergraduate years, as I do find coding very fun, at least within the classroom environment. There is something about the tactility of the keyboard and screen, coupled with the addictive move-on-to-the-next-step lesson structure, that seems to inform the “tinkering” experience that others have mentioned here, and that we have discussed in class. When code properly executes, I feel like a microtransaction of some kind has occurred in my brain, one that yells “Success!”

At the same time, I find myself feeling an inordinate amount of anxiety in relation to upcoming lessons within the Python tutorial, and also in relation to the prospect of trying to code a functioning, meaningful object of some kind by the end of the semester. (My final project in that undergraduate coding course, a game of blackjack coded through Java, would not execute). As someone who has always loved solving algebra equations, and multiple-choice tests, there is something about exiting the fill-in-the-blank structure of the tutorial that is terrifying to me.

Perhaps my coding anxiety comes out of a background in poetry writing — as someone who was never much for recognizable fixed forms, finding ways to innovate experiences in language that had the appearance of developing from the ground up has always been exhilarating. But code in Python, like the traditional sonnet, has a series of beats and lines that must be filled according to protocol; I will not be able to Berriganize my code, despite a desire to, by the end of this class, produce some kind of aesthetic object that eludes fixity.