Coding. How hard can it be?
Six years ago, I said to myself, “I’m going to learn how to code. How hard can it be?”
At the time, I was working for a food company. I was frustrated by the constant digging through emails, the lack of a central source of truth, and the seemingly constant firefighting. (Sound familiar?) The company wouldn’t pay for software to fix these issues, so I decided to write my own apps and scripts.
I asked a software engineer friend where to start, and he sent me a PDF of “The C Programming Language.”
If you’re not familiar with the book, the very first lesson is: printf("hello, world\n").
It took me 6 hours to figure out where to type this and how to run it.
When my computer finally spit out those two stupid little words, I was hooked. I used every spare moment to hack away at my app for months, breaking it over and over again, each time learning a little more about how all the pieces fit together. It was like playing a video game where you can only see the bit of the map that you already explored — the whole world was dark and fuzzy around the edges.
I was lucky enough to get a job at YouTube as a data analyst, where I somehow convinced our engineering team to let me start fixing bugs. After I squashed enough bugs, they even gave me my own desk as an official 20% engineer! I almost cried when I saw my name on the desk.
Throughout it all, I tried not to ask “dumb” questions. I was too embarrassed to admit when I was out of my depth. Rather than asking for help, I read the docs, I read the code, and I hacked. My tests failed over and over again, and once I broke an externally facing page in production. Someone on Twitter noticed.
With every failure, I learned a little more. Ask me about iOS testing sometime!
I later applied my engineering efforts to “social good.” Working with nonprofits introduced me to a new kind of developer. They didn’t care about technology for the sake of technology. Their focus was the mission, and technology was a tool to achieve the mission. You see, most people don’t work at Google. Most engineers are resource constrained, and they simply want something that will help them do what they want to do with as little pain as possible.
Enter Developer Relations!
A couple months ago, Google launched a pilot program to provide Googlers in the business organization the opportunity to transfer into technical roles on the Developer Relations team, and I am *extremely lucky* to be one of the four initial participants. We just graduated from a six-week engineering bootcamp, which can be better described as a crash course in technology, frustration, growth, failure, and empathy. Each day, we covered a new technology, spanning everything that a developer would touch — backend, frontend, microservices, cloud, logging, debugging, ML, etc. After six weeks, I kind of understand Promises. (Frontend development isn’t so bad, I *promise*)
“I’m going to learn how to code. How hard can it be?”
My journey’s not done. I’m grateful for every bug I ran up against, every failed test, every night I stayed up hitting my head against the wall. Because now I can say with complete honesty — I know how y’all are feeling. I’ve been there! When the documentation assumes you know where to write “hello world” or when you feel like you’ve bitten off more than you can handle, I’ve been there!
I hope I can be helpful, and to start, I will tell you a secret. Learning to code really isn’t about coding. It’s about perseverance, problem solving, humility, design, interpersonal skills, and more. And it don’t come easy.