And by the seventh day of the 10 x 10 challenge organized by the South Florida Entrepreneur Club, I have chosen to meditate on bravery. Coding with Bravery was the most difficult for me to approach from a mindset perspective. Of all the emotions and characteristics being explored in this collection, bravery is the one that comes the least naturally for me. As someone who is a relentless overthinker, acts of bravery or courage require overcoming a strong propensity for risk aversion. I batted around a few different ideas and tried to imagine how they would manifest, but never really felt that I was hitting the mark with any of them.
I think in the end the concept was just a little out of my grasp. Instead, I reached out to Nicholas Mohnacky, founder of bundleIQ and one of the most fearless people I’ve come to know, to help me conquer this theme. From my perspective, Nick is someone who has normalized adversity and engrained it into his daily routine. Several years ago Nick began one of the earliest drives for a startup culture in Palm Beach County. Despite stepping away from South Florida for a short period of time, he remains one of the foremost leaders and influencers in our area. Oh, and he’s also the reason why about a dozen of us are writing these articles every day for a week and a half...
The other night Nick and I discussed what it means to be brave before trying to design any kind of application around it. It was interesting to hear how he viewed bravery, “Doing something without fear of consequence. Typically in the face of adversity.” I think as a generality this pretty much nails it. Nick suggested we build a randomizer of brave figures throughout history that would highlight courageous people from all different backgrounds. This was exactly the insight I was looking for. While trying to come up with an idea on my own, I was focusing simply on one type of act of bravery, but in this exchange I was reminded that this character trait can display itself in a seemingly limitless number of ways.
Before getting started with the program this morning, I met up with Nick and Karla Cordero, collaborator and affirmation writer for Coding with Kindness, at a local coffee shop to gather a list of notable figures to include. It was fascinating to comb through profiles and biographies to curate a data structure that in some small way could speak to the motif of bravery and its various forms. As always, the code is quite simple and even in some ways imperfect, so it was the ability to explore history and culture throughout the day that made this program the most exciting. In building this app, I’ve learned about people, events, and time periods that I would have otherwise maybe never been aware of.
Although the code I wrote today was intuitive and straightforward, the most challenging part (aside from the CSS -- which Todd Albert refers to as my Achilles heel) was actually coming up with the short biographies for each historical figure. It was so damn difficult to take these monumental actions and events and boil them down into two sentences. In order to overcome that block, I built in my escape hatch where a button could lead the user to a webpage and they could learn more about each person.
At the end of the process one of the most satisfying moments was updating the “Coding With” collection website. Unintentionally as I wrote the code to unlock today’s challenge, my commit message was “reveal bravery”, which I can be certain will be the greatest commit message for the rest of my life. On a more serious note, as I mentioned earlier, all of this wasn’t as obvious as it seems in retrospect. Grow closer to the people you admire, who inspire you, who challenge you, and encourage you to leave your comfort zone. I am really thankful for how this collection and experiment has evolved, and for the people who have collaborated with me and will collaborate with me in the last few programs.
This is fantastic, Michelle!