Don’t Fall In Love With Your Code
written by Justin D. McArthur
“If you love something, set it free…”— Richard Bach
First and foremost, this is very much a letter to myself.
Being relatively new to coding, it can occasionally feel miraculous getting what I type into my files to behave how I imagined. It can feel like if I don’t stick exactly to the method I’ve developed to accomplish things, that there’s no possible way I’ll be able to still accomplish those things if my method is altered. My way or the highway as far as I’m concerned.
If it is not blatantly obvious, this mentality is not ideal. At all.
This approach stems from a couple of personal stipulations, the first being my loathing of wasting time, the second being a belief that I can always find my own way out of problems.
Let’s tackle that first monster: wasting time. Spending copious amounts of time on anything to result in it not working or not being noticed is something I detest in general. Perhaps drawing off of too many YouTube videos stating how each moment of life is precious, wasting so many moments for absolutely nothing is an abhorrent thought for me.
Combine that with the fact that what I’m spending all of this time on is a new skill, I tend to get defensive and want to stand by what I’ve produced to an unhealthy extent. Even if its inefficient or not totally reusable, my mindset becomes “Well hey, I met the goals I was asked to with the code I wrote, there’s gotta be something to say about that!”
While meeting the goals of an assignment or project are certainly desirable, so is being able to modify and adjust your code during that time to make it more usable, compact, and easy-to-digest. This is a mentality I am pushing myself to adopt moving forward.
The second stipulation of believing I can accomplish tasks entirely by myself does stem from situations pertaining to my personal life. While it has helped me out (rather a large amount) in life, I also do understand that coding and software design is a LARGELY collaborative effort in which communication is absolutely essential. Plugging in hours of code without relaying that information to the team accomplishes nothing towards the end goal, it leads me to exclusively focus on what I’ve written more than anything else.
In the future and on my next collaborative efforts with programming, I eagerly anticipate relaying all the tasks I am working on so that the team is at least aware of what I want and am trying to accomplish. This way, even if the project largely falls as my responsibility, the team will know what I’ve chipped away at.
With the approach to coding that I have to do it all, and can’t waste my own time, I’m really revealing how scared I am of trying to grow in this field. The capabilities of what I can produce and the height I can achieve is limited to myself, while everyone else is the combination of themselves plus what they’ve learned (and are currently learning) from others.
Communicate.
Have an open mind.
Put in the hours coding with the knowledge that it can be modified and edited.
Accept criticism where applicable.
These are habits I will be striving to adopt, and I know I’ll benefit from it.
