Last Saturday, I found myself in a position no perfectly rational human being would want to be in. The dark, narrow (sometimes scary) bus was found to be guilty of transporting me back home from a long day in Beirut, all while also transporting my sanity down to never seen before lows! Yet, I chose to drop all charges and found the conditions ripe to indulge into an esteemed creative activity, commonly referred as programming by people who cope and say that ai won’t replace them, referred as hacking by 70 year olds, or just simply referred as having no life by everybody else.
I quickly opened up The Odin Project to see my next task. The task was simple: create a square grid that colors a square when you hover above it, kinda similar to the etch-a-sketch toy that kids used to play with in ancient Babylonian times, before some fruit company, called Apple, replaced toys (and professional tools!) by something that goes along with the word pad (ePad? iPad?!).
After quickly asking ChatGPT hacking up the solution for this project, I found myself really proud to actually manage to do something tangible in that excellent work environment! Though, it only took me two seconds to see how bad my submission was, when I viewed, and compared, community submissions to it: it is similar to the jump from a “Hello, World!” page to a full stack application!
Driven by the motive of making my name show on that sweet leaderboard, 2 hours of staring at the wall ensued, before I came to the grand idea of recreating a childhood painting game, with the required task functionalities. The game was CrayolA Art-Studio, it was a painting educational game released in 1994 for Windows 3. Given that age gap, and given how difficult millennials are to work with, I didn’t expect that working with this 31 year old would be any exception. It took 1 day alone to successfully emulate windows XP on my M2 Macbook Air, before being greeted with even more stubbornness when I visited this 31 year old! Albeit at the end, I got the treatment I wanted, and I was greeted by her majesty with a nostalgic, long forgotten screen.
After receiving that nostalgic boost, it was time to just jump into this project, and enjoy the progress! I implemented the design, and most of the features easily they took 1 week alone. Starting with the, difficult to implement, gradient border around the canvas, and all the way through to the fill algorithm that I gave up on, and just copied, I found myself hanging out with Google and ChatGPT way more than I had wanted. At the end, and looking in retrospect, I found myself regretting only one thing about this project: that I hadn’t done similar projects prior.
The thing is, a few months prior, I was diagnosed with a chronic case of “tutorial hell”! The news struck me, I tried denying it thinking that I am a perfectly healthy software engineer that doesn’t even need the help of either Google or ChatGPT, but what I didn’t realize was that I didn’t need their help, because I have been stuck in a coding comfort zone, not willing to jump into new technologies that I didn’t learn through a well built course! For this reason, this programming project has been truly revolutionary for me! It will hopefully be my first step in curing my disease!
This is what coding is about! It is a creative art based on building projects that you love. It is not about learning all these new technologies just for easy money, it is not just about getting hired at a big company and just coding for a paycheck, at the end of the day, anybody could do that, AI could do that! Not indulging in coding as a fun hobby, and not using your creativity in coding, means that you are as replaceable by AI, as a wooden plank!
Add to that, practicing coding as an activity that you just do for work, makes it clear why one wouldn’t enjoy coding and would find it boring! With that in mind, practicing coding as a creative hobby outside your professional life, would reignite that creativity, problem solving, and childhood curiosity that had been lying dormant inside us, ever since we had bills to pay bills and taxes. It would combine all of these values, resulting into a much more fun and fulfilling work experience that is rarely found anywhere else!
For that reason, and given how the new year had just started, I invite you and me to set aside a small period of time, everyday. A creative programming time that you would use to work on fun projects, or learn topics that you would find interesting, outside your professional life, and regardless of you background!
It is rarely that this new years motivation wave hits in, so it would be a good idea to go along with tide and foster a fun and fulfilling programming career!
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