Real Artists Ship

I think I’ve been afraid of computer science since I’ve been young. The first CS class I ever took was Intro to Java in high school, but I had been dabbling with computers ever since I was young. I still remember when I learned basic HTML — I wouldn’t even consider that coding, but the fact that I could type some characters into a file and upload it to Xanga, giving my teenage blog a new look, was amazing to me. It was cool.

I was a terrible student. In fact, I still believe that I am. I lack the discipline to finish projects all the way through, to grind through problems where the answer is not initially easy to see. I get distracted easily, and sometimes will go days without working on a project I deem important because of procrastination. In high school, Java was hard. Code never works the first time around, and debugging was an arduous task. Object oriented programming, arrays, namespaces — none of that stuff made sense to me and I never sat myself down and forced myself to learn it. I mean, “public static final void main”? My 13 year old self just wanted to play Runescape and Heros of Newerth all day. I would fall behind in class and get my ass kicked repeatedly in class and on tests. I think I never finished building anything. (However, I did figure out how to run StarCraft: Brood War from a flash drive so I could host LAN parties in class)

College was much the same. C++ isn’t something that came naturally to me. I was determined to at least try this time around, but pretty soon I was falling back into my old habits again. I never did well in any of my CS classes, and junior/senior year when I was trying to write basic firmware for my IEEE projects, I felt the consequences of my laziness.

After graduation, my friend and I were drinking PMT downtown Palo Alto one day, when he said something to me that I remember vividly: “You know, you have a really interesting work cycle. Most days of the week you don’t do jack shit; your productivity is low and you fuck around a lot. But there are always one or two days where you’re extremely motivated, and get a ton finished. I’m not saying it’s bad or good, just making an observation.”

But he made a really apt observation, even though he didn’t want to offend me. It WAS a bad thing, and both of us knew it. Discipline triumphs over motivation every time. Consistent growth is something we all strive towards, in fact, in the Silicon Valley, that’s the measuring stick that values everything. What would you rather prefer: a consistent 7% MAU growth every month, or a 15% growth some months but stagnation during other times of the year?

So the last few months, I wanted to achieve this steady growth that I’ve always been lacking, as well as conquering one of my biggest fears. I set a goal of 4 pomodoros a day solely for coding, and spent the time every day in a coffee shop working on my new website. During this time, I realized I did have a strength I never realized was important. I can easily get obsessed and absorbed in topics I find interesting, and will spend tons of time digging into the content and learning as much as I can. When I dove into the world of web dev, with the encouragement of some of my friends, I felt like I just came back from the desert, dehydrated, and this knowledge was water. I drank and drank, every day, in the same spot in that coffee shop, all the internet had to offer. And the more I drank the more I felt like I was trying to drink the entire ocean. There is just so much information. What the hell is redis? heroku? rails? node.js? bootstrap? It just went on and on and on.

Today, I think I’ve finally reached a small plateau. I wouldn’t call myself good, or even comfortable at writing code, but I think today is the day where I realized that I could do it. I could transform this vision in my head into something tangible, that others can experience as well. I deployed my code into Heroku, and even though it’s really shitty and basic, I built something. There is so much more to learn, but I’ve finally started to overcome that fear of failure, of unknowing. And now I don’t want to stop. Real artists ship, and I want to become a great artist.