By mid-course your Code Journal stops being only a diary and becomes something rarer: evidence. The person who wrote your week-one entries does not quite exist any more, and because that person wrote honestly, you can prove it. Showing growth means putting your earliest self and your current self side by side and letting the difference speak.
Growth is a claim plus evidence — like a bug report
“I got better at programming” is a claim, and a claim on its own is worth nothing. A good bug report never says “it’s broken somehow”; it says what happened, where, and how to reproduce it. Growth writing meets the same standard: every claim backed by two dated entries from your own record.
In my second entry I wrote: “The computer does not guess. Kind of unsettling.” Last week a
TypeErrortold me which line and which two types disagreed, and I fixed it in two minutes without asking anyone. The strictness that unsettled me is now the thing I count on.
The claim is error messages have switched sides. The evidence is two moments, months apart, both on the record — and nobody can argue with that, including the part of you that suspects you have not changed. It is the standard How Marks Work applies everywhere: what can you point to?
How to cite yourself
Treat your earlier entries the way an essay treats sources:
- Date it. “In my entry from the second week of the course…” The distance is part of the claim.
- Quote a phrase, not a page. Your words from the time carry more truth than your summary of them now. “Mine still worked though. I keep thinking about that”, from Your First Entry, says more than “I was curious about loops.”
- Then show the now. A recent moment, just as specific, that the earlier you could not have managed — or would not have noticed.
Growth is not only writing bigger programs
Some growth is a new noticing: spotting the off-by-one in a classmate’s code during Spot the Bug, predicting a crash before the run confirms it, hearing what a client said rather than what you hoped they said. New noticing is growth, and your early entries prove it was not always there.