Why did I start programming? The journey to free market economy
To start with I would like to stress that English is not my native language and I am by no means a writer, so please bear with me as I share few of my thoughts and experience other people struggle with too. 👽 I got into this thing back at my Uni, at interactive media class. I studied Design under the Architectural university and I found that rendering shapes and motion graphics intrigued me more than actual major study. With no compiler run time and just generating small websites seemed so much more to learn than actual study at the time. So after study I moved abroad and got an internship at the Digital Design Studio DeMonsters working on flash and animations for AR. Apart from my digital ambitions I also did all kinds of odd jobs living in Amsterdam (selling magic mushrooms, designing all kinds of flyers, dancing at bars- are just to name a few!)… The most important decision I made in this period is to learn iOS development inside a BootCamp environment in 3 months i created accountability and commitment to ObjactiveC and Swift. Here is where i got to meet the world of persistent storage, recursive functions, predicate algorithms and nib files. Fist two years where real hard, and if you are not ready to ASK many, many unanswered questions, prepare for the looong ride 😰. This makes me think of how this discipline has several carefully crafted abstractions (legacy shit), one on top of the other. And slowly, we keep peeling apart the layers(onions 🌽) and learning more and more about how our iOS software actually ticks.
Well for my first few months, I would bring my laptop home and work in the evenings, sometimes weekends. This was not expected of me. I did it because of all the pressure I put on myself to be at the same level as the rest of my team, which was completely unrealistic, because they had been doing this work years longer than I had. At some point, I decided to purposely leave my laptop at the office and never look back. It was the right choice.
Side projects are the key
If you’re exploiting your position to make unqualified decisions, the people with real qualification will soon start to notice. On the other hand, if you stay ‘real’ and approach conflicts with honesty and confidence in the knowledge you have, you will most definitely be rewarded by your skilled peers. Admitting that you do not understand something is a good thing and will most likely lead you towards a solution faster than hiding behind a curtain of technical terms and superficial knowledge.
Failure is a success, humble is a new ‘real’
