My first five weeks of code
I embarked on my maiden programming voyage with Valaa Technologies. This is part four. 1 | 2 | 3 | 4
“I think soon I’ll be able to code a chat app while riding a unicycle,” said Ville.
We were crunching our way across a gravel parking lot, having just wrapped a meeting and demonstration at Tampere Adult Education Center (TAKK). My job was to sit at a table of Finns and pretend like I understood what they were talking about, something I’ve had a lot of practice at.
I guessed Ville also wanted to show the staff that their first student to intern at Valaa had emerged drawing breath.
TAKK is a trade school tucked into an industrial area south of Tampere, churning out Finns of all ages who can make, build, operate, and clean. It also offers recent immigrants — including me — the opportunity to study the Finnish language and working life for six months.
They’d spoken about teaching Valaa at the school, and about the possibility of sending more students to intern at Valaa. When asked, I’d spoken well of my time there.
“Seems like it went well,” I ventured, hauling myself up into Ville’s gray van.
“It did, yeah. And I think it was a good idea to have you there.”
We rode in silence, afternoon sun washing us warmly with the muted heat of dying summer.
Unprompted, I started to tell Ville about how, while at Valaa, I’d experienced waking up in the morning and knowing the answer to something. How I’d found a sudden solution after days of agonizing. It was an incredible feeling, and I’d never experienced it as purely as I did there.
I felt the words tumble from my mouth and drift, aimless as dust-motes. There was a silence.
“Well…when it comes to what a new coder can do in five weeks, I think you nailed it.”
Over my last few days at Valaa, I’d added a couple of useful features to HelloHiker. The user could now expand their search radius up to 100 km, or shrink it down to less than 1 km. I’d made the UI clearer, done away with a redundant button, and even tried my hand at a bit of basic CSS styling.
Everything was running smoothly. But did it stack up to my original vision?
HelloHiker performed admirably, but modestly. There wasn’t time to add a map overlay or private messaging. While I was working to implement the photo sharing feature, I ran into a showstopper of a bug that’s in the process of being cornered and stomped. One of the partitions — the sections HelloHiker is divided into —had failed to load images properly. According to Ilari, because the images weren’t pushed to Valaa’s server, any further changes caused a mismatch between the code Valaa thought I’d written and the code I’d actually written.
It stopped development in its tracks — temporarily.
“Sometimes things go up but don’t come back down again,” Ville told me, smiling wanly.
Nevertheless, I’m excited to continue improving HelloHiker, and excited to share it with the Appalachian Trail community, when the new wave of hikers begin their journey north.
Learning Valaa was the most challenging thing I’ve done mentally. It’s because I’ve always tried to avoid situations where I might fail or be humiliated, instead coasting through life a bit too freely.
Over the years I’ve recognized the deficit and forced myself into weird situations and challenges. I have performed thousands of heavy squats, climbed and descended thousands of little mountains, and sat in complete stillness as incredible pain roared through my body.
But I’d never had a good reason to struggle so consistently against a series of challenging intellectual problems. Nearly everything I’d ever had to learn before had already been bookified, tutorialized, commodified. Do this, click here, then do that. Need a hint?
You’re amazing!
When concepts got tough or my interest waned, there was always a YouTube video or game to distract myself from the shame of quitting. No one would ever know.
At Valaa, I had no outs. Everything needed to be translated, its meaning and application teased out. Their documentation and tutorial — while well-written — were limited, and directed at more experienced developers. My one-on-one sessions with Ville steamed off my brain like ice on hot cast-iron.
I just had to persist.
Valaa showed me through direct experience that even the seemingly incomprehensible can be broken down into tiny parts, chewed through, and understood. That through engaging deeply with a problem for long enough, you almost can’t help but make progress.
As a Valaa programmer, I was the sculptor. Through my code and application structure, I shaped what my astronomers would see, and made sure, as they traveled, that their Lens always pointed home. Through clicking a button or moving to a different page, their course would be slightly but irrevocably altered. But they would never know — would only ever see what was in front of them.
At birth, we’re all little astronomers: we’re born with a Lens that offers us a set of options. But if we’re lucky, we’re not totally reliant on a benevolent sculptor carving out our place in the world and guiding us through it — we get to play a part in the sculpting of our own lives.
The more fortunate and able we are to affect the course of our own lives, the more responsibility we have to help others do the same. Through breaking down the barriers to software development, and breaking down the barriers between developer and user, Valaa is carving a path to doing just that.
I will keep coding.
