I am learning to code

I did a little coding in college. I loved it. I actually changed my major from Education to Computer Engineering because I loved it so much... until I didn't like my teacher. As a people pleaser and a perfectionist, having a teacher that was nice and seemed to like me is very important. My CS 2 (Computer Science)  teacher resisted my charms. He came to class with an attitude and didn't cheer up. Also, it became clear that I would not get an A and maybe not even a B. I dropped the class and changed my major to Electrical Engineering.

Electrical Engineering was a joy in school.  I loved the labs.  I loved my teachers, and more importantly, my teachers seemed to like me.  When I got a job as a Research Engineer, I thought I hit jackpot!  Unfortunately, this was not the case.  My coworkers (mostly middle-aged white men)  were not used to having a young black girl bouncing around the office.  The only other black women in the office were the admin assistants.  They understood my plight and discomfort. I loved them, but I was told to restrict my interactions with them because the *engineers* would see me as being an admin as well.  I quit.

Now that my babies are school age and I need a full-time gig, I decided to change to coding. I have a background (albeit very small) in coding. I have the hyper-logical mindset that is necessary to work as a programmer. Also, my husband is a genius computer scientist. You would think that my journey to become a coder is paved in gold. Alas, it is not.

Maybe it is me (It is probably me), but whenever I am trying to look up a coding concept, it feels like any of the answers are saturated with jargon. For example, I did a couple of javascript tutorials and I would like to do some practice on some of my own projects. I downloaded WebStorm, a purportedly amazing IDE (Integrated Development Environment: really just a fancy piece of software that makes writing code and finding issues/problems with your code easier).  I decide to open a new project from scratch and I get about a billion options:

Okay, 14.   

I give myself a pep talk.  "Ayana, you can do this.  All you gotta do is google... "  I think that Web Starter Kit looks pretty good.  I will start with that.  

Well, according to google (specifically https://developers.google.com/web/tools/starter-kit/ ) Web Starter Kit is "an opinionated boilerplate for web development." Seriously!?!

I know what "opinionated" means.  I was called that since I was a little kid.  And I know what boilerplate is.  But opinionated boilerplate????  I have no idea.  

Again, I tell myself: "Just chill, Ayana".  You can just google "opinionated boilerplate". I do this.  No results for the definition.  There is an opinionated boilerplate for React libraries.  There is an opinionated boilerplate for Node.  There is an opinionated boilerplate for HTML5 (you can see that there is an HTML5 boilerplate in the options above - not "opinionated" apparently).  But there is no definition for it.  I scour Wikipedia.  Nope.

How am I supposed to learn what this terminology means if I can't find the friggin definition??? How???  Somebody, please tell me!

Ugh.  I will figure it out, eventually....hopefully.