The infinite learning loop
The reason we stay awake till wee hours in the morning, drowning in coffee, but a galloping mind nonetheless.
The other day a fellow classmate of mine came up to my rather geeky friend, and requested him to quickly dish out the logic for dynamically solving the n-Queen problem. As my friend set into action and began looking up on his laptop the minor nitty-gritties of backtracking, the exasperated classmate gave up (in 5 seconds) and wandered off muttering about finding someone more ‘resourceful’.
If you code, and I’m not talking about the occasional class assignments here and there, then you probably know what I am trying to say. But for the uninitiated, let me spell it out for you — we are always learning.
Coders are not like answering machines. We have no defined answer to every question put to us, an answer that works in every scenario. More often than we like to admit, we are found taking help from here and there and building our own knowledge base.
We are constantly on the move. We crave for newer things to learn, and we are not ashamed of not having all the answers. Another good thing I have noticed in myself and those who code — we take pride in being a part of this humongous community. StackOverflow is the new Facebook, and GitHub is the new resume. We are pouring questions, answering people unknown to us as if they were our brothers, and making new friends everyday.
People who code happen to be very daring people.We are not afraid to take the leap. Last month on a winter school organised by Carnegie Mellon University, I remember feeling anxious on Day 1, trying to come to terms with the project I had taken up. But in a period of two weeks, my team and I had done a very good job at seeing the project to completion. The point I am trying to make here is, that we dream high and start low. We take small steps into a big task and before we know it, the tempo is building up, we are getting brainwave after brainwave, correct outputs are flashing around on the screen, and basically things are rolling. That moment of euphoria. That right there, is what we live for. That is the reason we stay awake till wee hours in the morning, sleep deprived, drowning in coffee, but a galloping mind nonetheless.
Coders are also extremely creative. Atop the text editor, we Ctrl+N our way into the canvas, and begin drawing lines of code with a paintbrush. (Too cheesy there? Sorry, apparently not all coders are the best writers. But you get the drift.)
We are always reading, analyzing and learning. You will seldom find a coder who claims to have mastered a certain domain or a programming language. Whether one plans to go into academia, or work for an I.T company, or get more adventurous and take the entrepreneurship train, if at all you code, you are always essentially researching. As for those who have their heart and soul into research, it bodes well for me that what I have been doing since the last four years is what I will be doing for the rest of my life too. We are all on an infinite learning loop.
And god forbid if you are a girl like me coding the hours out of your days, and still like to wear the high skirts and pencil heels to parties, the almighties of gender discrimination will jump on you! Time to change some stereotypes, there. But more on that later.
