So everyone has been talking about coding. This is the “in thing”, and everyone is doing it. It can’t be that hard right. I mean if everyone is doing it then it should be relatively simple. So you decide to look up some online coding courses. Ah Codeacadamy! Looks neat, and easy to understand. You start on a HTML/CSS course, I mean what’s the point of coding if you can’t build your own website. You spend a few days following the tutorials closely, earning all those little badges which tell you that you have learnt something new. After a week or so you have successfully built a website. Wow! You did it! You managed to learn the basics of building a website. This is BIG!
It’s time to do it on your own. So you start building your own project, your own website. Oh this other site looks pretty cool let’s see if we can do this! Hmmm, okay you don’t think the course thought you this. Let’s try googling it. Woah okay! Nope this is just getting more confusing. All you want is for the freaking title to fade out when you scroll down, how hard can that be! What’s this jQuery bullshit all these sites are telling you about? And so you forget it and make do with something simpler. At least it’s something, not too bad right?
Months later, the greatest coding you ever did was that shitty website which was mostly off a web tutorial. This coding is hard, how did anyone even believe that anyone can code. Surely you weren’t born for this. This is not your thing at all.
All that sounds familiar? Well that was almost exactly what I went through when I first tried to pick up web development. And I realised why coding is such a nightmare for most first-timers.
Coding is an attitude.
Most people don’t realise that being a coder, or developer is not as much about the skills or talent to be able to program as much as it is about having the “coding attitude”. What is the “coding attitude”?
Accepting that you are a dumb piece of shit, and you cannot single-handedly control any circumstance.
Coding is no place for a person with ego. If you have ego about your knowledge or experience or expertise, the code will take a massive dump on your head. Every time you believe that you are right, the code will throw an error. Every time you think it will work, the code will give you a new glitch. Every single bug you fix, a new one pops up. When you have finally mastered that Javascript framework, it becomes deprecated and a new version is released.
So how to handle this? Accept that you have no control, and be open-minded. Coding is somewhat close to attaining a higher state of consciousness. A state of mind where you accept that you have no control over what happens, and you are ready to face whatever scenario thrown at you, with all the resources that you have at your disposal. The coding attitude is the “Come at me with all you got” attitude, knowing you don’t have much but you’re still going to do all it takes to tackle the issue. This is not something that is taught in schools, but it is a hard lesson that one learns after failing many times.
I would not say that I have mastered this attitude, but I am trying to believe in it and let it sink in. I feel that this attitude is something which can hold in all aspects of life, when looking at it from a broader perspective. No scenario or circumstance is ever within our control, however what is within our control is how we choose to react to the particular scenario. Whether we choose to get upset and frustrated, or if we spend that energy looking into ways of resolving the issue, is always within our control.
That’s exactly how you glorify the glitches 😉
Cheers till the next time!
Keep glitching!
