Re: Comfortable with the struggle
Hi Rach,
I woke up this morning and began my usual routine: making coffee and sitting down behind the computer to read through new posts in my RSS feed. This has become a great start to my day lately, turning a previously low-energy morning into a high-energy start of the day. It's absolutely fantastic.
One of the new posts was yours: Comfortable with the Struggle. You advised (new) developers about the importance of enjoying the challenge of working with code. Only then can you succeed as a programmer in the long term.
I couldn't agree more. Being a developer means you need to handle errors well. If there is something that programming languages do all the time, it's communicating your mistakes right back to you. There are no mitigating circumstances. Those unforgiving red lines of text are direct and right in your face.
The magic lies in how you deal with them. It's like the high jump in athletics, the harshest discipline of them all. You are immediately confronted with an error in your jump when the bar falls to the ground. "Let there be no mistake," it seems to say. "You failed."
If you can't handle this, the life of a developer is not for you. Like an endurance athlete, you need to feel the pain. You even need to like that feeling. Because you know that if you manage to continue, it will eventually bring you the success you are looking for. Or, as you've said: "if you’re someone who happens to go one step further and enjoy the struggle, you’ve found the perfect career."
Your fellow struggler,
Yordi