‘I knew I needed a click…’

Staying motivated while learning Swift with 4 lines of code.

The last Daft Punk album has a phenomenal track where Giovanni Giorgio tells us, in one minute, how he got started in music.

What’s refreshing about his story is how honest it is; at one point, he knew nothing about electronic music. At all.

As he tells it, sitting down in front of a Moog Modular left him with one idea: get a click on a 24 track.

That click grounds everything, musically speaking. It gives you timing when you don’t have an instrument to actually play. Electronic music, like programing, can often feel like you’re flying blind. There’s nothing tangible about it.

And like programming, electronic music is often about taking a simple principle and adding to it. That click grounded Giorgio, but it’s not a song. He needed drums, or a bass line to round it out a bit. Then maybe a synthesized horn or guitar loop.

If you apply the same concepts to programming an app, it works. Classes and structs dont make an app, but they do ground the rest of your logic. An API call won’t solve all of your problems, but it will let you add functionality.

For those starting with Swift (my language of choice), there’s a lot of chatter about how ‘easy’ it is. Comparitively, that’s fair; it’s less verbiose and fussy than many languages, so it appears a lot easier.

If you feel lost while learning, know that it’s okay. Like Giorgio, those people you look up to on Twitter once knew nothing, just like you. At one point in time, they couldn’t tell you what a parameter or dot syntax was, even if they’re not willing to own that.

So when you feel lost, get yourself a click. Find that simple thing that grounds you to your work, even if it’s just plugging away at your lesson plan. For me, an actual click works:

var counter = 0

repeat {

counter = counter + 1

} while counter < 10

I can’t put it on a 24 track, but that simple bit of logic reminds me that whatever my problems are with coding (currently it’s hosted video APIs which, surprisingly, suck), there’s a way to solve it. Sometimes I just stick it at the top of files to remind me that my problems can be surmounted.

And yeah, sometimes the problem is motivation. But thinking about something like where that simple bit of code can lead to is insanely exciting, so I keep going.

One click at a time.