My Command Shift bootcamp started on Halloween night and I was nervous for some reason. Maybe it was the realisation that suddenly all the talk about doing this was over, and now it was time to get things underway. During our first lecture, we had to do icebreakers and in the lead-up to my turn, I was incredibly anxious. Logically it makes no sense to me as to why. I had done the same thing without issue not but a few days earlier on the induction call. I could feel my heart beating faster in my chest. I guess that’s anxiety, right? It doesn’t make sense.

After the lecture, we were placed into smaller groups to make sure that everyone had their environments set up correctly. During the lecture, it was mentioned that coding comes with its highs and lows. At some point along the way, it was going to get tough. I just didn’t expect it to be in my first ninety minutes of the course. At this point, I haven't even written ‘Hello World’ anywhere. My Terminal needed updating, to begin with, and installing Homebrew, Node.js and npm turned out to be more difficult than it needed to be. You might be thinking right now, what ghost in the system is causing this nightmare? Forgive me, I needed to shoehorn in a Halloween reference somewhere. So there you go. Future holidays beware. Our mystery poltergeist goes by the name of Ventura 13. For reasons I don’t understand, Apple’s latest OS update had wreaked havoc on my Homebrew installation. I had to manually install Command Line Tools for Xcode 14.1 Release Candidate 2. This was a big file and long after the first day of bootcamp was over I was still waiting for a progress bar to say it had finished. I left it to do its thing, I watched a bit of Peep Show and then went to bed.

The next day I spent an hour trying to set up my working environment myself and I didn’t complete it entirely. I already had VS Code installed so adding the Eslint extension wasn’t a big deal. Homebrew still didn’t launch because of the macOS 13 update, but I later went back to it and installed it without a problem. Messages in the Terminal were telling me that I had bad options, bad patterns and denied permissions. Fear not, the penny drops and I realise the solution has been staring me in the face for the past twenty-four hours.

Time to get this resolved and here’s the happy ending. it’s a practical lesson that I needed to learn. For some reason, I had been hesitant to ask for help. Even though asking for help had been promoted during the lecture. Trust me to be the one to have a bug right off the bat, everyone has set up without a problem. It must be me. All in my head of course. I asked for help the night before and my breakout tutor was really helpful. We'd discovered a problem that wasn’t common at the time and the issue needed more attention. I hope they don’t name it after me. I went into my cohort Slack channel the following day and explained where I was in the setup process. A tutor helped me see the solution and everything was sunshine and rainbows again in no time. The moral of the story is simple. If you get stuck, ask for help.