Software Development or Programming has Never been easy but...

 

I suck at programming, but I love it. What should I do?

Back in 2013 when I first started learning how to code at University, I had a very hard time understanding how to implement loops.

Whenever my classmates finished all their loop exercises in record time while I struggled with the very first problem, I thought to myself - man, I suck at programming!

At the end of the semester, with enough practice, implementing loops came as second nature to me.

About seven months ago, I had to develop a full-fledged Android app for an unit I was doing. The app was meant to consume an API which I had to create myself, call a bunch of public APIs as well, do a lot of math with the information and then plot the results.

I couldn’t for the life of me understand how AsyncTasks worked for making calls to the API. Moreover, I went completely blank while implementing fragments.

Basically, I sucked! Real bad!

In the end, though, I had managed to get a working app up and running:

To be honest, I still sucked to some extent (my code wasn’t the most elegant, and the user interface was mediocre at best), but I sucked a tad less than where I was at the beginning of the semester.

A few months ago, I had to code an iOS app for this other unit I am doing.

As expected, I sucked like there’s no tomorrow:

Wtf is an optional? Why can’t I force unwrap one? Why does Swift have to be so weird with null values and not handle them like regular programming languages do?!

How does delegation work again? Can’t I do anything simpler to pass information from one view to the next? Ugh!

After a few weeks of effort, I started to suck a bit less and had something to show, at least:

I could go on about the countless times I felt that I sucked at programming. But I know that’s not a bad thing. I keep sucking because I know I’m constantly exposing myself to new things and that can be pretty daunting. For instance, I’ll have to work with R in a few days for some exploratory data analysis tasks and I know I’ll suck in the beginning!

If you love coding like you say you do, you’ll begin to embrace the confusion and disappointments. It’s all part of the process.

I think Jake from Adventure Time sums it up nicely:

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