That Itch to Code
Supposedly writers will sometimes have a feeling, and then they’ll have no choice but to write something. Us programmers have the same thing. I’ll be watching TV, playing a computer game, talking on the phone, etc, and suddenly, an idea falls into my head. It begins to come together, new techniques come to mind, and suddenly I have a whole new project to work on. Sometimes its as simple as a new design for Brettia or Organon, but other times its something much more complex, so complex that I am amazed that my mind can even think of something so intricate subconsciously.
Many times during the past three years, I have wondered if programming was really for me, if that was what I wanted to spend my life (or a large part of it) doing. And each time I thought about it, I could never come to a conclusion. But my latest projects are proof, I think, that I was born to code. For example, I recently did an application for managing contact information for a large organization. While coding it, I was in my element. The computer was a part of me, not really a large chunk of metal and plastic anymore. I was creating something from nothing, a workable, usable solution from nothing but jibberish. As it got more complex, I’d sometimes hit walls where I’d realize that something that I implemented a long time back would no longer work because of a newer feature. I’d go back to look at the broken component, but with closer inspection, I’d find that it worked fine. Somehow I had coded it in a way that made it easily extendable, without even realizing it.
Back when I was still a novice programmer, this never happened. But now that I have risen to a higher level, the code just flows from my mind to my fingers to the keyboard. When I first started, I couldn’t even get a simple conditional statement (if something, then do something, otherwise, do something else) to work right; my screen was full of syntax (spelling) and parse (grammar) errors. But I got past that, and I got past arrays, and databases, and loops, and everything else along the way. And now I’m ready to take on more advanced programming using extensions like PDFlib, GD, and ImageMagick, and with the new object-oriented programming capabilities offered by PHP5, I can better my grasp of that.
Going back to my subconscious coding, today I had to add another field to the contact information database, a field for phone number extensions. My first thought was that I’d have to literally rip the application apart in order to add this functionality in. But it was as simple as changing six files and their corresponding templates, with most of these files requiring changes on only one or two lines. My weird so-good-at-programming-I-don’t-even-understand-it brain was smart enough to write an easy-to-use API (application programming interface) at the beginning so that when I wanted to add things in the future, it was simple to do.
I first tried to learn HTML back in the summer of 2001, and I was repeatedly baffled, no matter how hard I tried. If only all the helpful tutorials that are around now were around back then. But with the power of Notepad and several months of checking article after article, I had successfully put up a website (and redesigned it several times). And it was only half a year later that I moved on to PHP and never looked back. So if I can do all that in three years, how far along will I be when I graduate from high school? Will I have become a Linux groupie or a Microsoft sell-out? Or will the Mac OS have taken me under its beautifully crafted chrome-and-plastic wing? Or I could just do Java and support all three.
Anyway, now that I’m through my weird coding philosophy segment, time to move on to other things. It’s been a week now since I got my beautiful new computer, and I can’t even remember the slow days anymore. Now I just need to get some good games….
I sort of want to write more (actually, I want to CODE!!!) but I have to finish up my summer homework quickly so that I can have a few days to just relax before school starts. *sobs* Only ten days of freedom left!
Update
Forgot: August 1st was the two year anniversary of Brettia as we know it.