Most articles I’ve written so far are tutorials, with a few articles about completely random subjects, but this is definitely not the kind of article you’re about to read. You’re about to read the first few steps that led me to the road I walk today.
When I was in school, everything felt forced.
Don’t worry, I’m not about to drop some emotional baggage.
What I meant to say is that going to class felt like knowledge was incessantly shoved down my throat (or brain, I guess), most of it never to be used again in my life, much like a cache with a LRU (least recently used) eviction algorithm getting rid of a cache entry that wasn’t worth caching in the first place.
But then, I met programming.
During the first few times our paths crossed, I had a purpose in mind - I wanted to be able to do something in a game, therefore I blindly tried understanding the lines of texts before my eyes, copying lines that provided a similar behavior and shaping them to my will.
But these first interactions weren’t when I truly felt the depth of my appreciation for the text before my eyes.
No, that staggering feeling that assaulted my heart happened when I wrote my first bot on a chatting platform much like IRC.
It was so silly.
A user would write a command in the chat which would trigger a response from the bot, initially in the form of a static responses that I had hardcoded. I found that fascinating, even if these simple commands gave a very predictable output. It slowly evolved from static responses to having the bot pick a response from a list of answers (i.e. “Hello”, “Hey”, “What’s up”) and then customizing that further by using the user’s display name (i.e. “Hello, John Doe.”, “Hey John”)
As time went on, I started thinking about what I could do to make the bot slightly more interesting.
What if I could leverage other “websites” to spice things up?
I so foolishly thought to myself, not even knowing what an API was.
This was the transition that lit my passion like a burning flame - I had went from wanting to accomplish a simple task, to wanting to find new tasks to accomplish.
Unfortunately, a year or so later, the amount of free time I had slowly decreased until I eventually changed interest, and this was the beginning of a long series of back-and-forth between finding a purpose to write some code and then going on a pause.
Things have changed since these faraway days, as I now understand that if you cannot spend your time doing what you actually enjoy, the ephemerality of life will disappoint you sooner or later.
That said, it’s not that I had lost interest in programming at the time, rather, I didn’t know what you could do with programming, and the only thing that propelled me to write code was when I was tired of repeating the same process, or when I had an idea that could save me some time.
For instance, at one point I made a script that scraped a series on a light novel website (sorry) one chapter at a time and extracted all of the relevant text into a text file until it had scraped all chapters available. This prevented me from needing internet access, which was especially useful for reading on my phone at the time (keep in mind that this was back when smart phones were at their early phases, with mobile data plans being either non-existent, or very limited).
Seeing and benefiting from the result of my own work in real time felt amazing.
Later in life, I’d come to realize that this feeling of joy also came when others used what I worked hard on for their own benefits, much like a painter showing off his new creation to the public and hearing them voice their adoration or contemplate the intricacies hidden within the painting.
Perhaps it is the same for everybody at some point in their life when they find something they truly enjoy from the depth of their existence, but at the very least, this is what led me to desire to endlessly improve myself, strive for a challenge and deepen my understanding of the vast field that programming is.
I love programming - recreating the wheel dozens, hundreds, thousands of times.
This is one of the few things that truly give meaning to my life.