Hello, and welcome to my first article! I bet you stumbled upon this and wondered what on earth it could be about—after all, this is a community brimming with developers and coders. Who in their right mind would openly confess to being terrible at coding in such a setting? It's akin to showing up at a Chef and Cooking Convention only to admit you're clueless about boiling water.
Well, that person is me, Seej (just a nickname, for the sake of easy pronunciation)! Is there a good reason for this? My best friend Alex, a seasoned software engineer, would probably say no. This isn't my first rodeo with such admissions. To put it bluntly, I loathe coding. No, scratch that—I absolutely detest it. It sends my brain into a frenzy of flips, twists, and turns, ending with a metaphorical spewing of its contents. Quite the imagery, right?
Okay, maybe I'm being a tad dramatic. I just don't get the "leetcoding" and the "10x'ing programmer" stuff. Do I understand the basics of writing code? Yes. Can I build a webpage, invert a binary tree, or have "5+ years of experience shipping production-quality code"? No. If given more than a week to try to build something and try to make something work, will it work? Probably.
The world of software is a vast mountain of new concepts, products, and acronyms to master. My attempts to scale it have been sporadic at best: half-baked ideas, projects abandoned after a week, and CodeAcademy lessons left 10% complete. I'll be the first to confess my grasp on Python is shaky, my coding practices questionable (thanks to MATLAB), and my understanding of "recursion" embarrassingly vague (please, hold back your laughter, Alex).
So, what exactly is "Seej Sucks at Coding"? It's my effort to start afresh, to embrace my shortcomings head-on. This blog is a place for genuine growth, where I plan to share my journey from coding nemesis to, hopefully, coding enthusiast. It's where I'll deconstruct ideas and projects into manageable steps and, fingers crossed, build something remarkable, mistakes included. Consider this the diary of a sparky who's decided to commit to pivoting into software and logging every agonizing step.
This blog also serves as my personal revolt against the daunting, perfectionist image of the "elite coder." I'm here to say it's perfectly fine to struggle, to encounter gaps in your knowledge, and to feel utterly lost over what might seem like basic coding principles to others. I'll explore the concepts that have stumped me, share the resources that have parted the clouds, and, yes, recount those facepalm moments over errors as trivial as a misplaced comma.
And my goal? To be honest, I'm not entirely sure. AI has always captivated me; I've dabbled in Computer Vision (hence the Python) and can fire up an AWS EC2 instance. There's a nexus of these interests somewhere, but it seems I need to "kaizen" my way there—taking it slowly, one step at a time.
I hope you'll come along for the ride. Maybe you'll find humor in my trials, or perhaps you'll see a bit of yourself in this journey to break into what feels like an impenetrably complex industry. Whatever your reason for reading, you're warmly welcomed aboard this wild expedition. Thanks for reading!