There's this quote I saw on LinkedIn which says 'a good programmer is someone who looks both ways before crossing a one-way road,' and you know what? After about 2 years of staring at error messages at 2 AM, I believe it. I now double check everything and I always expect disaster even when everything seems fine and smooth.
Now the big question; If the clock struck 12 AM and granted me mastery of any skill by sunrise, what would I choose? For me, there's no contest on this because I would trade it all for complete coding and technical mastery, the kind where every programming language flows like my native tongue, where I can read a codebase like a novel, and where it becomes an actual superpower.
The Struggle |
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Look, I can fumble my way through Python, and I have written quite a number of JavaScript codes as I try to boast my confidence, but let's be honest, starting from scratch in tech feels like being dropped into a foreign country where everyone speaks in Swahili patterns.
At first, Stack Overflow was my only dictionary, and you know what that means? When I copy code I don't understand, I just pray it works, and when it finally does, I would be too terrified to change anything, lol. That's not learning, that's fear of the unknown, hehe.
The other day I spent about 4 hours debugging a script only to discover I had named a variable 'user' in one function and 'users' in another. I spent the whole night trying to figure out what was wrong only to find out I mistakenly added a letter "s" instead of just "user." That was the night I regretted all my life choices and wondered how I got into this field in the first place.
To make things worst, it seems like others are moving forward while I am still stranded. Learning feels slow and boring for beginners and I see only masters taking over the tech industry. There's imposter syndrome, the feeling of "I have not learnt anything compared to my peers".
What Mastery Would Feel Like |
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But imagine just for this one magical midnight, waking up with the complete vocabulary of code, like the ability to see a problem and instantly architect the solution.
No more tutorial torments where I would watch video after video but never quite build anything real. No more "I'll come back and refactor this later" because I hardly do. No more explaining to my non technical friends why I can't just possibly build the next big blockchain for them.
How would it feel like to just sit on my desk and examine a complex problem, maybe it's a distributed system that needs to handle millions of concurrent users. Before even researching anything, I would prototype, break things down, fix them, break them again and see the solutions.
Not because I am guessing, but because I understand the deep structure, the memory management, the concurrency models, the math beneath the messy reality. That's the mastery I crave, not to show off, not to get rich quick, but to finally feel fluent in the language that builds our world.
However, the midnight truth to note is that starting from scratch is exhausting but it's noble, it's necessary, and it's the only real path to mastery. Every bug we chase, every moment of "oh my god it actually works" those are the dues we pay, they are the scar tissue that makes us careful and humble.
Here's my response to this week prompt:
What is one skill you wish you could learn overnight?
Thanks for reading ♥️