That's how it starts

In June 2011 I became unemployed for the first time since graduating from university in 1986.  At the time, my best buddy suggested I consider making games for Android -- he knew I'd written an escape-the-room game in Flash some years prior, and Android was an interesting new platform which could run Flash.

I had no idea where to even begin with that, so I never did.  I was in a panic about having no job to pay the mortgage, and grabbed pretty much the first job that came my way: IT manager.  I hated the work, I hated the drive, but it paid.

Nine months later that job was dust under my feet and I was unemployed for the second time. The difference? I was totally relaxed about it. I had saved my pennies, gotten a decent severance, so I could take my time looking for a real data analysis job.

And in the middle of this I had begun dating a wonderful guy who is a Java programmer.

I'm a dinosaur. I'm a good Foxpro programmer, but nobody uses it anymore.  I can claim to know SQL but once you get to the part of the interview where they ask you T-SQL or PL-SQL or MySQL, I have to say "none of the above," and though the flavors are 95% the same as Foxpro, knowing Foxpro is worthless.  "Thanks for coming in."  "Great, look forward to hearing from you."

I touched on OOP for some Foxpro applications I wrote, but in the day-to-day stuff I had no need for it. So I never really learned OOP.  I understand it in the abstract (yes, you too can create this object called a car and give it attributes like a color and methods that tell you how many MPG it gets!) but the concrete is still powder in an unopened bag.

And this super cool Java programmer boyfriend shows me this little toy he wrote for Android. And he asks if I'd be interested in learning.  Since I have nothing better to do with my life besides playing escape-the-room games and looking at jobs I'm not getting, I say "sure."

He sets me up with an IDE and loads up the Android SDK, shows me the Hello World program. I'm goggling at IDEs and SDKs already and he says, Why don't you just make a little thing where you press a button and it plays a sound or something like that.

It takes me like two weeks of googling and searching Stack Overflow, copying barely-relevant chunks of code wholesale from sites and trying to tweak it to make it do what I want. ("Do what I want, not what I tell you to do!")  I don't know Java at all. I barely understand the purpose of a layout file. I've never even used an IDE that autocompletes -- really!  At the end of it I have a little hand-drawn cartoon goshawk .png that does a coyote howl when you click it.  It's awesome.

And the boyfriend says, hey, why don't you animate it or something?  I want to be able to fling it around the screen and have it bounce off the edges. That might be useful for a game.

And slowly, insidiously, this fantastic boyfriend (who gladly comes and helps whenever my pride breaks hard enough to ask for help) keeps throwing little projects at me, mostly Android, sometimes Java toy environments like Greenfoot, and he gets me to learn.  Classes.  Methods.  Overriding and implementing native methods.  Anonymous inner classes. Contexts.  Instead of copying code and tweaking, I'm actually writing it myself.  And I'm actually starting to understand.