So you want to become a developer

I promise I don’t want to talk about me. I’ve done it enough in my life and there’s nothing interesting for you if I go that route with this blog. I know it, you know it, everybody knows it.

But this isn’t a post about me. This blog isn’t about me either. It’s about what I’ve been doing in the last year.

A little over a year ago, around Valentine’s Day, I went back to coding. Back in 2023 I’d completed a fullstack web bootcamp, nothing’d stuck with me, yadda yadda yadda.

But I had invested a pinch of my time into understanding what the f*ck a closure was (not sure this thing particularly paid off). How conditionals opened a door while keeping others closed. Why I should bother to iterate through an array of values and so on. And the worst part is that nothing of that investment had returned me a single minute of joy. It’d all been one frustration after another.

Granted, back in those days I wasn’t paying too much attention. My focus was elsewhere. Weed and games. Beers and friends. Anything but what was in front of me. You name it. In February 2024, when I returned to coding, I decided to change that. No more distractions.

A year and a month after that, I couldn’t be happier.

Don’t get me wrong, there’s still A LOT of frustration. I bang my head against the wall more often than not. Xcode error messages sound like Sumerian to me. I tend to overlook basic things that make my code crash. The main differences now are that I kinda accept these moments as part of the process. And since I’ve been paying more attention to what I’ve been reading, watching and writing (in code), due to the force of habit (and not to any particular talent or intelligence of mine) I find it easier than before to find a solution.

Actually, no, that’s not true.

What I find easier is to deal with my feelings of frustration while I look for a solution. And thanks to having a better understanding of the code and how things are supposed to work, I start playing around until the solution presents itself.

Maybe this is the part of coding that I would’ve appreciated I had been told when I was entering this world. Everybody talks about how important it is to practice every day (IT IS!). Or how there are highs and lows (THERE ARE!). But nobody told me (or perhaps it flew right above my head) that I’d have to learn to live with frustration. That it’s OK not to find a solution to a problem in this very moment. Go to sleep, take a shower in the morning and look at that issue with fresh eyes. Don’t feel stupid if you can’t solve it. Don’t feel like a god if you solve it. Think about it, but don’t get obsessed with it.

Maybe nobody told me because that was also part of the process.

I don’t mean to sound cocky, but I know for a fact that now I’m a better developer than I was six months ago. Not because I have more knowledge and I’ve published two apps, but because the more time I spend writing code and thinking about it, the more comfortable I feel with everything I ignore about it.

I think this is a pretty good place to stop writing. I don’t think this blog is gonna go anywhere in terms of audience and I don’t really care about it, but that won’t make me stop from trying to produce some kind of quality content in case anyone runs into it.

Also, I’m working on a new app at the moment. It has no name, but I’ve made a lot of progress in under two weeks, which makes me kinda proud.

It’s also made me sweat and want to bang my head against the wall, but that’s a story I might or might not tell when I launch the app.