The Beginning
Hey all (or Hi to the 1 person who actually stumbled across this with searching for something else and accidentally clicked on this link).
This is my first attempt at creating a blog. I’ve thought about doing one for years (since I’ve been a web designer for over a decade so it should have been easy), but now’s the time for me to dive in head first.
Why am I doing this? Well, to be honest, because I need to hold myself accountable for sticking with my studies, and to keep a record of my progress (and snippets) to see how my skills grow and develop. This idea came from a YouTuber, Network Chuck (https://youtu.be/b4PK1NFcRTM?t=244) who dropped the idea of keeping track of ones progress, not just to show the world that you can do a specific task, but to show understanding through teaching it to someone else. I found this to be an amazing idea, but also to keep a memorial to the hard work and dedication that I put in to better myself.
In the book “The Pragmatic Programmer”, Andrew Hunt tells of a programmer who would carry around a plastic duck, and debug their code by explaining the code, line by line, to the plastic duck. If he wasn’t able to explain it effectively, then it was too complicated and he would go back and rewrite the code. This very often fixed any issues that were happening in his code.
As Einstein once said, “If you can’t explain it to a six year old, you don’t understand it yourself.”
I’m a huge fan of the Astrophysicist Richard Feynman, and even when he died in 1988, there was a note on the top of his chalkboard that read “What I cannot create, I do not understand.” I want to create, understand and help others who struggle as much as I do.
My goal is also to help others get started in something that I am very passionate about. I love the feeling of creating something from nothing, and seeing it work in the way that I intended, and not settling for something that works “good enough”.
So, enough rambling. It’s time I start kicking up dust, put my nose to the digital grindstone, and begin this endeavor. I think I’ll start in the most basic way: Writing clean code…