A Coder’s Life

Monica James
Aug 8, 2017 · 2 min read

Today a shitty coding error happened at work to a good colleague of mine and it got me thinking serious things about my day job. I’m a full time programmer and the risk of doing something as small as removing a extra semi colon in the code resulting in a billion users not being able to access thier user account s is as common as the bird shitting on your clothes on your way to work. Welcome to my world.

There are most days when things go well, when you code to glory and you hit the F5 button and the computer Gods look down on you and bless you with results without errors. But there are other days where nothing seems to go right and you start questioning your entire mortal existence.

As one of my colleague puts it, if you open a can of worms, you’ll find another can of worms inside it and another can inside it. You never know what can lead to what, especially when you take over pieces of code someone else has written and start building on top of it. It’s crazy I say, its really crazy out there.

But I like my job. Despite having days when I feel like a complete dimwit, there are days, after the dimwit days, when I look back and I’m happy for the things I’ve overcome in the past and the lessons that came out of it.

I believe out of all the lessons a person learns, the most important ones are the ones that you actually learn out of experience. A Coder’s life is full of lessons from experience. The more you fall, the better are your chances of getting up and standing even taller. For what its worth, it’s even much better if you make mistakes early in your coder life journey. That way you won’t screw things up when you miraculously scaled to the Pinnacle of your career and don’t have to suffer the embarrassment of people looking and laughing at you when you make a 'silly' mistake.

I am also grateful for the opportunities a coder has to undo and redo. If I don’t like something, I can break it and build it again and again and again until im happy with it. Which other professional can proudly boast of this? I can see the final results and still decide to go back and start from square one just to make my code better, cleaner or faster.

It’s always battle of time v/s effort with a coder. If you do within the deadline you rock. If you don’t, well someone else will and I make an extra effort to learn what it is I am doing wrong and make it right. The learning is just infinite. You can never really say you’ve learnt enough. Learn the ABC’s and you’ll have words. Learn the words and you’ll have numbers. Learn the numbers and you’ll have equations. Learn it all and you’ll have French.

Welcome to my world. Welcome to the Life of a Coder.

Monica James

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Software Coder | Dog Lover | Content Creator | Inspiration Seeker | Fiction Writer