How I feel, after years as a self-taught coder.
It’s been 6 years since I self-learnt how to code (I’m a designer by trade). What are some things I feel, have felt and continue to feel today, yesterday and accumulated over the years?
Frustration
You’d think with all our digital wizardry, Set it, Make it and Play would be hardboiled concepts in your everyday coding playbook. Look don’t get me wrong, it was like that when I first started. It was a lovely, serene, bird chirping heaven, all wrapped within my fifteen inch screen of pure godliness. Repeatable functions, intertwined lines of logic, creative expression that rivalled my best days as an architectural designer. Instant digital cities man! created by the sleights of my fingers.
The reality though is that all that wonder and godliness needs maintenance and constant tlc. And not a bit too, lots of it. Like a gardener tending to the Eden patch, coders sift through dirt looking for failed crop and untended heaps of weed and mangled overgrown mush. If there was such as thing as an area spray of mass destruction targeting particular families of bugs, we would gladly use it. But instead, we get a humble spade. Maybe two. And endless documents telling us everything, except what went wrong. Of course without Google, the greater god, our own godly status won’t even exist. We would be nothing, and still are nothing, without being able to copy and paste, and sometimes learning, from ranked search results made up of coding gossip and open-source, good-hearted, communal knowledge sharing.
Love
As much as it’s hard, frustrating and sometimes impossible, I still love coding. I wouldn’t know what else to do if I weren't coding. My second love, movies, pale in comparison. Movies don’t itch my itch. They soothe and accompany, but coding helps make you feel useful and powerful, even if it’s hard getting the intended results.
Like design, coding is a part of me. If design is in my blood, code is the affair, ever flirting with my mind, promising the world and a better future, whilst consistently and predictably falling short.
Feeling Dumb
After all these years, you’d think I feel smarter. But age taught me the more you knew, the less you realize you know. Coding ain’t no different. I knew this with design and philosophy — you gotta learn to pick your battles. If you had to die, which battlefield would you want to be in?
The difference however is between actual knowledge and metaphor. You literally cannot know everything in code. There’s so much new stuff that you feel lost in the ever growing ocean.
So you choose your battles, and I choose certain areas of code that I’m comfortable with — front end. I’ve had to do a lot of backend stuff too but really just novice sort of level. I still don’t understand most of the core concepts, and I’m ok with that. It’s not who I am. Get used to not knowing with code, for sanity’s sake.
Hopeful
After frustration mixes with love, and bashed in with feeling dumb, what you do you end up with? I still have hope. Code is as limited and powerful as design and architecture is. I won’t say it’s any more or less powerful, as they serve different purposes and solve different needs. Coders need architecture too after all, and architects need software. It’s been enlightening to see how code is different to architecture though, like what it impacts and how, and compare it to how buildings do it. So it’s gives me tremendous hope of what code can do for us. Is that stating the obvious? It sounds bland but I’m being truthful. I love and hate code but feel hope that for all its tedious messiness it does great things. Better?
