Last week I spent a full day from 8am – 8pm coding – debugging, building, breaking, creating.
And it was fantastic – I took a small break for lunch, had no meetings and the rest of the time I spent it reading blogs, writing code, debugging, working through problems, trying to find solutions.
Was I in the “zone”?
I wasn’t killing it, but I was hustling and driven to create something.
Did I learn a lot?
You bet, there is nothing as invigorating as learning something new and stumbling through it. No matter what you end up with at the end of the day you always come to realize that you accomplished something – I don’t care what you accomplished in that day – it is just an incredible feeling to have put keyboard to screen and have created something.
And therein lies the magic of Software Development – Creating Something from Nothing. That’s it, there is nothing else to it, software development is about creating something from nothing. Take whatever you do and find the one task where you get to create something from nothing and imagine doing that all day long.
And for the learning? Coding gives you this great opportunity to read what others have created and learn not from manuals from them and if you’re like me, you might blog a bit about it and try to give back – to the next guy or gal that’s spending their day coding trying to learn what you just did.
