Oh! It works. Oh! It doesn’t work.
I am sure you’ve seen this meme once, twice, one too many times. The response, “But why?”
Ok, by now if you are still floating, feel free to look up what C++, python or C# is. Do it now please, because when the robots have taken over, these are the questions they’ll ask you. No, I am kidding; I am just as terrified of rogue robots as you are.
Sorry I digressed. The oh-it-works-oh-it-doesn’t-work phenomenon (oh, did I just name it?) happened to me today in the morning. I was working on something a friend of mine conceived. Don’t worry, if my procrastination doesn’t catch up on me, we’ll launch it soon. I have some background knowledge about “classes” and “define” when they are in the same sentence as python so I thought diving into Tkinter—a sub language of python—would be a walk in the park. For this reason, soon after my last cup of white tea in the Morning-I take lots of white Tea-I got down to business. Truth be told, there was no business.
In the three hours that I had been typing, backspacing, deleting, and copy pasting (please give that person who came up with StackOverflow a beer), I had nothing but a 360cm by 540cm empty window before me. Completely blank. What had started as an exciting ambition of coming up with the next Facebook, took just three hours to be a blank page.
You may think that it was such a painful waste of three hours of my life I’m never getting back. And that is somehow true: you may be right. But my experience, I am consoling myself, is relatable to those who have gone before me in this world of coding.
Richard Branson once said, “If somebody offers you an amazing opportunity but you are not sure you can do it, say yes – then learn how to do it later!” Admittedly, I began this friend’s project not knowing where it was going. I was like an aimless voyager. Along the way, I have sworn I would never be a computer science major: yet I know that best/worst case scenario, I’d go into front end developing. A story for another day. Every time I got an error, I felt like taking back what I believed. I felt that whoever said the best way of learning a programming language is by working on a project might have been correct; though what he probably forgot to say is that it is the hardest way to learn! I can’t overemphasize.
It may have been the harshest road I have walked on this year. Yet, each bug I have overcome, each correct code I have written has drawn me more into it. Even if for each thing that went right, umpteen went left—sorry, umpteen went wrong, I am driven to try and build what I set my mind to. So as much as each new error seems bigger than the one before, I’m subconsciously aware that I am making progress.
Personally, I don’t think anyone is born with a talent of coding. What I think people are born with, is the perseverance to bear errors. The ability to type a thousand lines of code that won’t yield anything due to something as trivial as forgetting a full stop between a class and a parent (I really tried to avoid the jargon here!) Not that if you aren’t born with this perseverance you are at a disadvantage: you can always acquire. The more lines of error-ridden code you write, the better you become at debugging them, eventually the better you acquire the perseverance. Writing code is one of those fields that build grit. As a beginner, I have faced many obstacles, any of which might have resulted in a less spirited programmer… Wait, I know why it didn’t work!
Codify 