How learning to code changed my life?
“Everybody should learn to program a computer because it teaches you how to think.”— Steve Jobs
I was not happy when I joined my Bachelor of Technology Course majoring in Computer Science. It was a forced decision on me by my parents and some of my relatives. This is very common in India and most of us hate it but are used to it. But this turned into a boon to me and it became the best decision of my life. I fell in love with computers and software technologies, I was amazed by how the miracle machine runs, and once I started writing code, I felt that I am invincible and could do anything in this world.
It gave me Psychological comfort
At that point in my life, I was going through my lows, I wanted to join the best college in the country but I was unable to get to it. I was going through a feeling that “Nothing is under my control”. I had lost confidence in myself. I felt no one would support me in my low phase.
I was internally struggling a lot and during this time I attended my first C Programming Lab. I wrote my first program to print “Hello World!” on the screen. I don’t know why but I had goosebumps when I saw the output. Then wrote my second program to add two integers and again I had goosebumps.
“When everything felt out of control, this machine just does what I say to it”.
Probably that day, that moment is where I found my new life and the new world!
Sense of control
We all know that most part of our life is not in our control, we are not sure of the situation we face in the world. For me, coding every day gave me a sense of control, I know I can’t control most parts of my life, but when I sit to code, I have everything in my control. Once I have the feeling that I have things are in my control I felt safe then I was able to start being creative, I opened up my mind completely, I started experimenting. This change while coding, impacted other parts of my life too.
It changed the way I think
To write code, you have to think like a computer, you must write your code empathizing your computer. You must understand what your computer can understand and you have to write your code inside that boundary. This type of thinking process which I adopted every day while coding made me more empathetic to other people in my life, I was able to collaborate with other people really well.
It made me more Spiritual
The deeper your understanding of the technology, you would get inclined towards spirituality. Just imagine, just 0s and 1s, in other words, high and low signals through a tiny chip are able to match and go beyond the human computational ability. When you spend time reading and understanding how this whole magic is happening inside the computer, you will get a greater understanding of human beings and their thought process because even in the brain it’s just a bunch of neurons firing signals at each other!
I started doing more
For me seeing the results instantly was rewarding, I code for 20 mins and see the output or I would write few lines and see what output I get. It is so rewarding. The tougher the code, the higher the reward. It is so because you can break the tough problem into achievable chunks and start writing code for each chunk and then you can integrate them together. This approach to solving problems can be applied to anything complex in life and most of the time it works.
Learned to Self-learn
When you start facing issues while coding, you start reading a lot and start various approaches and you would teach yourself how to do certain things which you never did before. It starts giving you a unique ability of learning by yourself. Once you are used to learning things by yourself then you can start applying the same to other parts of your life.
I hope this blog inspired you a bit to start coding and would help you to build a better life!
