Brandon Wang

5 Life Lessons Coding has Taught Me

Coding is a passion, a joy, and a love to me. Although it’s extremely nerdy of me, sometimes I just love to sit down and code for an afternoon. But coding hasn’t just been lines of parentheses and exclamation marks. It has taught or reminded me of many things in life.

From mistakes to rushing, I think that coding as well as the rest of my life (school, sports, music) have pretty much placed me more prepared for the real world than I was a year ago. But I still have a lot to learn.

One little mistake can change everything.

One question mark (or lack of) can change everything in code, and the same holds true in life. Maybe it’s not a mistake. Maybe it was just a small overlook. But eventually it will backfire.

Once, I was riding my bicycle while on the phone. I wasn’t wearing my helmet and had taken it off. I’m cautious and generally stand up to people insulting me about being a nerd and wearing a dork helmet, but I decided not to wear it for ten minutes while I took the call.

Bam: my helmet is hanging on the left side of my bike, my phone in my left hand on my ear. I notice my helmet is going to fall off so I reach over my right hand to grab it back. I’m skilled in riding without hands, so it shouldn’t be hard, right?

Second lesson from one experience: never try to steer the other side of a handle / steering wheel / control with the other hand. Never. It won’t work out.

All your work may be for nothing…

I spent three days on version four of my website design, thinking that it was important, it wouldn’t be a waste, that I could use the design for the rest of my life, and that all the work was worth it. And then, after a month or so, I started thinking about phasing out my design.

Don’t do much more than you need at the moment. Spending days and days on something for someone or yourself just to find out that he / she / you doesn’t even care can be a heartbreaking moment.

…but do it anyway.

I learned a lot of stuff about WordPress when I redesigned my original blog with the K2 framework. I learned a lot of (useless) stuff about table layouts. A year later, I learned CSS and how to do layouts with divs. And I learned more design sense with the fourth revision of my website.

Sometimes, things in life are meant to be done with repetition, meant to be redone. Just because you do something that you eventually phase out or not use anymore doesn’t mean it wasn’t useful at that time, or mean it isn’t going to be helpful in the future.

The best learning experiences come from real-life. Reading a book about Javascript isn’t going to help as much as actually coding a project with it. Looking at bike manuals all day will definitely be completely useless when coming to actually riding the bike.

One step at a time.

If there’s one thing I’ve learned by traveling, it’s that you can’t think that driving faster by five miles an hour is going to get you there faster. I mean, technically, yes, but psychologically, no. You’ll need to drive your five hours before you get there. Don’t try to circumvent this. There is no shortcut to success.

Coding a project is almost the same: maybe occasionally you’ll find an easy way to fix everything. But most of the time, you’ll need to sit afternoons out, debugging and coding. It always seems like if you write an hour of code, an hour of debugging is guaranteed. Don’t try to go around it. It never works.

Even now, when I write code that I know what to do, I find myself occasionally debugging. It’s a mountain you have to drive over. Because going around won’t get you anywhere.

Sit back and admire your work.

When you’re done, it’s always great to sit back and take a look at what you’ve done. When I finished a design, I would always zoom out, look at it as a whole, and admire it, at the same time looking for flaws in design: white space, image placement, etc.

But what I did feel as I was looking for these flaws was a sense of accomplishment, a feeling of pride. It’s a great feeling knowing that your work looks or performs great.

Image: The Outpost by Tutvid from stock.xchng

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