This Tuesdays was one of those days that every programmer goes through but it doesn’t make it any more fun. A character building day, one could say.
I did an excellent job in allocating a big chunk of time for coding (7h38′ in total) but apart from maybe the first hour, I didn’t get anything done. Early in the morning I accidentally deleted my last week of work thinking I was just cleaning my control source environment. That is not too bad, as the application I wrote isn’t massive and it’s very well documented. The problem is that somehow my Visual Studio Code was also ruined. Omnisharp stopped working and nothing was getting imported into any project.
I’m not sure it’s fixed yet, it seems like turning Omnisharp’s “Using Global Mono” to “Never” did the job, but it’s too early to celebrate. This one thing that has always frustrated me a little bit in my coding journey. Sometimes I’ll do things without really knowing why and how they work, not because I’m too lazy to dig in but it’s because there are thousands of those things in any given app and If I try to see through the fog of every class I’ll never anything done (I can barely get anything done as it is).
Implementing Principles
One of the things that can be quite frustrating in coding is that it takes a while before there are palpable results. It’s a thing most people feel or have felt, particularly those who work in large projects, where their contribution is too tiny to be noticed, as Alain De Bouton points out in this excellent video about finding meaningful work.
That’s why I decided to implement a simple principle. At any given time I have to work with clear goals and sub-goals so I can be proud of what was achieved up to any point. That will lead me to finish a number of small applications that will serve as a portfolio to be proud of.
As I know this is something that bothers many beginners and might even ultimately get them to quit, I decided to create a brand that will deliver quality educational material: Cappuccino Coding. I’ll expand on it later, but basically the idea is to provide a series of tutorials for building real-life (or close to) applications. At first, they’ll be a bunch of APIs that will be scalable and with different levels of complexity, isolating components and architectural concepts that can be quite intimidating when put together, as most of the best tutorials do. The transition from the “Todo List” kind of app to the enterprise level app is very confusing. There are a handful of very good tutorials out there, but I still think there’s a massive gap of quality material in the middle ground between the super simple and the super complex. That’s the territory Cappuccino Coding will try to occupy.
Enjoying The Process
Cappuccino Coding has it’s name because I want something that people will remember. I do like Shut Up and Code but I think that’s too aggressive. I think cappuccino conveys a better message: Sit down and enjoy the process. There aren’t many things I enjoy more in life than sitting down in a nice cafe with a fantastic cappuccino doing some work.
Merging Blogs
This is the third blog I’ve had since I’ve started coding, which shows how inconstant my mind can be, or all over the shop, one might say, but I’ll do myself a favour and merge all posts in this blog so I can have a nice archive starting from my first javascript course at Code Academy in June 2019.
See you soon!