Go Ahead - Write the “stupid” code

When I finished school in 2010 (yep, along time ago now), I wanted to go try and make it as a musician. I figured if punk bands could just learn on the job, I could too. But my mum insisted that I needed to do something, just in case. So I went down to the local TAFE (this is like a trade school in Australia, though it has pathways into uni, it’s pretty neat!) and signed up for whatever looked good. I had always loved computers and gaming, I did all the courses for computing short of programming in school (the school didn’t offer it), and had an interest so I signed up.

It wasn’t love at first sight, as I still remember after a week freaking out in my room that I couldn’t do this. But I sat down with my massive VB.NET textbook we had to buy and pushed through it. And once I made it through, it clicked. I fell in love with programming after that, and it became something I was both good at and started growing a passion for.

From there, going through my games diploma, and my bachelors in games design and development (think a comp sci degree with game design elements, it’s pretty neat and I’m happy to answer questions about it), I wrote a lot of stupid code. Like a lot of it. In my courses, in my game jams (god good times), in my spare time when I was learning things both in uni and early in my career. It helped me refine my skills, but also learn a lot.

Fast forward to today. I’ve been doing a dive on JavaScript/TypeScript and different runtimes like NodeJS and Deno, amongst a bunch of other stuff. At first, I was looking into a deep dive into node with this talk by James Snell and wanted to try out the Streams API. Part of me wanted to start writing straight away, but held back because I didn’t think I had anything to use it on. After being unable to resist the urge to write some code after a few minutes, I just made the dumbest stock ticker I could so I could try streams out in an arbitrary way. But it left me thinking, “why didn’t I hold back”.

As I’m writing this now, I came up with the answer. As I was writing a little app to output inspirational quotes, I started umm’ing and ahh’ing over if I should make this. It’s small, it’s dumb, and there were probably plenty of options out there. But I wanted to write some code, and was interested in trying out Deno and seeing how it compiles binaries. So I did it. And I was happy (I’m very excited to use it), and I realised that I was scared to write something dumb. All my years of doing this helped refine my own abilities, but also made me much more harsh on myself. Harsh on my own code, harsh on just trying things.

After coming to this realisation, I’ve decided I’m going to give myself more grace when it comes to writing software for myself, and I encourage you all dear readers to do the same if you’ve been feeling this. There is no stupid code. There’s only code. Enjoy writing it, it doesn’t have to be nice or pretty if it’s for you. Have fun, try out that new runtime or language. Poke around and see what breaks. Keep that learning mindset, and keep feeding your curiosity. It’ll help you continue to grow across your career, and if you enjoy this kind of thing as a hobby like me, it’ll keep stoking your own enjoyment and passion.