Discovering Arduino and Fixing Seven Brothers: A Rookie’s Tale

Today has been a mix of curiosity, small victories, and a few “What on earth am I doing?” moments in my coding journey. Let me take you through the rollercoaster!

Diving Into Arduino

I spent a good chunk of the day binge-watching Arduino tutorials on YouTube (check out this one and this gem). They’re fascinating! Watching them has me dreaming about all the cool gadgets I could create—robots, light displays, or even just a fun toy to keep my kids entertained.

That said, while my enthusiasm is high, my understanding of Arduino is still very much in the “baby steps” phase. These videos feel like a glimpse into a magical world where everything is shiny and exciting but just out of reach—for now.

The Programming Challenge: Seven Brothers

On the coding front, I decided to tackle a challenge from the Programming with JavaScript MOOC. The task was simple: fix a program that prints the names of the seven brothers (from the Finnish novel Seitsemän veljestä) in alphabetical order.

The original code looked like this:

pythonCopy codeprint("Simeoni")
print("Juhani")
print("Eero")
print("Lauri")
print("Aapo")
print("Tuomas")
print("Timo")

The goal was to rearrange the names alphabetically. With ChatGPT’s help, I managed to fix it. Here’s the corrected version:

brothers = ["Simeoni", "Juhani", "Eero", "Lauri", "Aapo", "Tuomas", "Timo"]
brothers.sort()

for brother in brothers:
    print(brother)

Seeing the brothers line up in alphabetical order felt like such a win!

When Things Go Wrong

Of course, I couldn’t leave it at that. Feeling confident, I decided to tweak the program to print out names of my own choosing. That’s when I hit the dreaded syntax error.

I couldn’t figure out what I did wrong. It’s one of those moments where coding feels like it’s mocking me. Instead of spiraling into frustration, I decided to pause and tackle it another time. Sometimes, you just need to take a step back.

Reflections

Here’s what today taught me:

• Watching tutorials is inspiring, but practical challenges are where the real learning happens.
• Small wins, like fixing the Seven Brothers program, keep me motivated.
• Syntax errors are inevitable—laughing at them helps.
• Knowing when to stop and take a break is just as important as pushing forward.

What’s Next?

Tomorrow, I’ll revisit the modified Seven Brothers code and try to figure out what went wrong. I’m also planning to keep exploring Arduino challenges, but I’ll stick to small ones for now. Baby steps, right?

The progress may feel slow, but even tiny breakthroughs remind me why I started this journey.

Have you ever felt like you bit off more than you could chew when learning something new? How did you handle it? I’d love to hear your tips in the comments! 😊