Programming insights to Storytelling, it's all here.
Two friends went to their first meeting with an investor. They were developing an App and needed some money to quit their job and focus entirely on it. When they met the investor, he asked if they are both developers. The answer was no. So he asked them what is the role of each in building this application. One of the guys said, well I'm no developer but I came up with the idea. The question that followed offended the idea guy.
Failing often, making mistakes, struggling, hustling, this is the recipe to build character and success. That's what we hear on the receiving side of the podium.
The computer is a controlled environment. None of its parts is sparingly built. For every device attached to it, there is a team that tirelessly worked to bring to life. The programmers spend the better part of their day building software that, to the best of their knowledge, will never fail. But just in case they fail or don't go as planned, the same programmers throw errors to know exactly what went wrong.
The secret to lose 10 pounds in a week, the secret to be more productive, the secret to appear on Google's first page, the secret to become a millionaire. I used to read those, but now they seem more like a cheap attempt to make money off of desperate people. On the web, spam site took those books and refurbished them into click bait articles who exist for the sole purpose of generating more page views and ad impressions.
Shut the world out. Chose one language. Any. Then get started.
When the thing you do the most is consume, you are more likely to get bored. That could be shopping, watching TV, watching YouTube, surfing Reddit or reading articles on the web. All those things give you the illusion of being busy while all it's doing is releasing dopamine in your system.
"Good artists copy, great artists steal." The same quote has been used to justify the creation of beautiful art, and also to download pirated copies of movies. The web tends to take things of important value and turn them into a sad over emphasized joke. But I don't want to focus on that today. I want to explore how to create something original.
I went to re-read the stuff I write on this blog and yes, I tend to lean toward the negative side of things. The world of programming is complicated, it is stressful, it can be depressing, but it is also the best industry to be in.
I didn't love programming before I started. It was a mean to an end. I was broke, dropped out of college and needed to make a living. Programming was something that made sense to me. When I read code, it didn't feel like a coded language that could only be deciphered by smart people. To me it was simple sets of instructions that allowed communication with a computer. A computer's language. I didn't see a flash of light followed by a hipster song montage with me coding in the dark with the screen light shining on my nerd glasses. I don't even wear glasses.
It is tempting to think that the reason open source software works, is because it is free. Linux, Apache, Nginx, android are all open source software and they make the world go around. It helps that they cost nothing to get, but the reason they are so successful is because they are amazing pieces of software.
