Hello World

The point:

Something I have struggled with during my undergrad is maintaining the passion that I know I have for software and programming. As such part of the reason I created this website was to document the things I am interested in and working on, I hope to be able to look back one day and see the progress I have made and how I have grown. The other part is that it's an excuse to sling some code into a text editor, as I have been building out the basics of my website, I've notice just how much I miss the feedback loop of writing some code and seeing the changes.

I'm not sure how relatable it is, but at a certain point of being a sophomore or junior (2nd and 3rd year of a 4 year degree), I came to the realization that I hadn't programmed a single thing for myself in recent memory. I bet you could hunt down my friends and ask them to confirm, but that was a really big realization for me, and it came during a time where I was feeling uncertain about my decisions and course work. It felt like something was "missing".

I was really enjoying learning still, I could derive happiness from my assignments and labs, but it wasn't the same enjoyment I had felt when doing projects that were personally fulfilling. I told myself things like "well you don't have any ideas", "theres nothing you want to program at the moment", "maybe wait to find a bug in a FOSS you use", and I regret that. Once I decided I could wait for something to pique my interest, I stagnated and lost a lot of fulfillment in my life as a whole.

In the midst of this "crisis" I was going through, a friend introduced me to the youtuber Tsoding who then introduced me to what he calls "recreational programming". Something about this clicked in my mind, I saw a dev who was clearly more senior than me just programming for fun. I realized that I don't need a reason to do something, and that the act of exploring can be fulfilling itself. It doesn't matter if I spend 8 hours to scrap what I was working on, if I can look back on those 8 hours and see progress and learning, that is reward enough. I had wired myself during college to be a robot who outputs code that works and move on, when I fumbled around and couldnt figure something out, I felt frustrated. Being able to adjust my mindset made such a difference.

In a way I was able to reignite something that studying had sucked out of me, I felt like I could do something out of passion and fail and still come away having grown. It mattered a lot less to me about the end product and I started to appreciate the journey it takes to get there.

So thats where we are today, there is something magical about going in without a plan and slinging code into your text editor and just seeing what works. Not everything needs to be engineered from the beginning as a product, and not everything needs to be planned or drawn in XML (probably to my Software Engineering professor's chagrin). Sometimes it is better to fumble around in the dark than it is to flip the lights on.