Why I’m learning to code

I run a company whose product is written in code, and I don’t yet speak the language. I sometimes feel like a newspaper publisher who has to take his editor’s word for it that the articles are good. You trust your people, you know you could never write the way they do, but it would still be good to be able to read.

Coding, no surprise, is also a different kind of thought from what I do all day every day. I have to eliminate distractions to do it, and — if I can ever get that flowing thing going — I bet it could even be meditative. I’m enjoying the variation in ways of thinking.

I love the imagination of it — I find myself putting as much work into thinking what to build as how to build it. And only some of the “how to build” work is actually coding, more of it is envisioning how the different pieces of a project should relate to each other, what they should each try to do.

I love how alien it is to me. Every time I open my editor, I’m reminded that I can’t just “jump in for a few minutes” the way I can with my usual work — either because coding isn’t like that, or because I’m not good enough yet. It takes me time to rev up, remember what I was supposed to be doing and how it fits together. Forced syntax, ugly websites from the 1990s that still seem to be the sources of record for a beginner’s questions, the sense of a whole world that I’ve only just begun to explore…