Craftsmanship ??
Now This?????
Not that anyone is going to ask me, but if they did, I'd say that programming is a lot like martial arts. I've done some training over the years and recently I've seen a lot of notorious people in tech show affinity for martial arts, I believe they come hand in hand.
Martial arts tend to be in origin oriental, obviously there are some occidental, notoriously jujutsu has a Brazilian variety and there's capoeira of course, but you know top of mind: Karate, Kung fu, Tae Kwan Do, Muay Thai, Judo, Aikido and plenty of others. And really, makes a lot of sense to me, there is something about culture in the east that is so successful in mixing body and mind in a single philosophy like yoga and meditation in general to name 2.
To me is an inviting thought that these kind of, as the name suggests, martial practice is and can be very much like the mindset around programming.
It's a common theme to associate semantically practicing grounds with how programming is thought of and executed, I taught at a bootcamp where teachers were called sensei and classrooms were called dojos, it's a natural association in my mind, both can be similar in nature, they also have a process where yo need to train to become better and as you progress down your career you can climb higher in ranks and start to earn different certifications (usually in the form of belts or other gear for martial arts). Now obviously where they differ and couldn't be further is in the physical aspect. I'm not gonna try and bend that or go around the fact that programming has very little physical involvement and for sure doesn't promote mental or physical well being, in that sense, we'd be way better getting away from our sad little (or big) screens.
But in a general sense and what refers to philosophy of training, you can see the similarities for sure, one other aspect that might be, somewhat, but not really, is the competing aspect of it. I've thought of the interviewing process as some sort of competition, like a tournament kind of thing, but that might just also be my mind stretching reality.
So just in terms of getting better, I want to talk about an oriental concept that I've found to be really similar and that is 守破離 (shuhari written in Kanji). Now you might have come across the concept, but if not, I'll tell you what it means in broad strokes.
It is composed of three stages, each represented by a Kanji (Symbol in Japanese) and its described as a method to reach mastery, now I can't attest to it 100% percent, this morning I was spitting at code that eventually I figured I wrote last week ??, but you know this is about the journey and not the destination (there, some fortune cookie advice just for you).
According to wikipedia:
Shuhari?roughly translates to "to keep, to fall, to break away" or "follow the rules, break the rules, transcend the rules".
Where each stage is as follows:
shu?(守)?"protect", "obey"
ha?(破)?"detach", "digress"
ri?(離)?"leave", "separate"
And to the way I've experienced programming and learning in general this fits a little bit too perfectly, this is really the process I've followed from the beginning, a lot without noticing, not the leave part, jajaja like I said, still learning, still plenty to go, but I do get glimpses of it at times.
I also enjoy very much listening to and playing music and in that regard, I've seen this reflected too. I've been playing for a while now, guitar and then piano, and for a lot of time, my skills were very limited, I was stuck, that is until I decided to stop dancing around and went on to read music theory, that's it, you really can't break a system unless you actually understand it, I've seen a lot of musicians in YouTube and other social media, going over what to them seems so natural and so obvious, but for the uninitiated (ha!) looks like ?? and really it's indistinguishable from magic what some of they do, I use to get the same vibe, and mostly still do from experienced programmers and senior members of teams I've belonged to.
领英推荐
You really can't miss that they start doing things naturally and express in a way that is very easy to see, hard to reproduce. I remember scratching my head (mostly cause I didn't understand it) at the fighting scene of the matrix, you know which one, where Neo starts fighting Morpheus in a dojo, actually, and then the crew is watching at a monitor with what it seems to be only gibberish. Ha! see I didn't plan that, but you get an example of technology, programming plus martial arts mental association in media for free, ok so back to the scene there is this inexplicable thing that the Wachowskis conveyed so well that is there is code that makes little or no sense, but something is happening and unless you have the ability, unless you have the skillset you can't understand it, and really that's how programming looks like for a while until...
You decide to follow the first step, I'm really not trying to promote any kind of doctrinal way of doing things, understanding for sure won't guarantee that your execution (wether is playing music, coding or anything else ) will improve but at least for me, it has set a pretty good stepping stone. And really when I started I used to struggle, both in music and programming with things that conceptually were hard but they appeared harder because I wasn't willing to "obey" or to follow the steps.
To protect the already walked path of people that has learned and has executed for years, so for music, I went on to not only study music theory but to learn scales and naming conventions, learn how to read music sheet, among other things that might seem tedious at first. I had some "talent" when I started, I'm pretty good at figuring things out, that's why I code for a living I gather, I like puzzles and craftsmanship and my talent or because I don't struggle at much to pick things up, oh my, it has been the worst advisor and the worst mindset, I used to think I would just talent my way to the place I wanted to be, and to a certain extend it might work, talent and/or natural ability only took me so long, sure I was playing guitar in a couple of weeks, but from there on, I probably reached the best I've played at 17-18 when I learned a lot of songs by heart and then that was it, I've never been able to really improvise, to jazz to a tune, until I realized, relying only on what I already had wasn't gonna get me any further, same for coding, picked it up pretty fast until I realized some people who started along were moving faster and that's because they decided that skipping the hard parts wasn't for them. I struggled with that, to this point I still don't like the hard parts of anything jajaja, but I've learned that it's either that or hitting a plateau, and so if you stick to shu?(守), even after having some "domain" over things, you start to see results.
shu?(守) ????
My shu?(守) for both music and coding has been books, I've understood and improved on things so much more over the last 2 years than the sum of all my time with either, when I was just "winging" it. I've went through the initial books and I've gotten so much out of it, for my work, "Javascript: the hard parts", "Mastering typescript", "Nodejs Patterns", to name a few, but there's so much to read and learn when it comes to technology, plus video courses, blogs, documentation, it's crazy! and some I haven't finished by the way, but I make a habit of coming back to them and "obey" even if it doesn't necessarily makes sense for something I'm doing right now, but it, most of the time, creates a bookmark in my mind and I can go back to it and reference it, because "I read it somewhere".
But also courses, sitting through them, attending them, trying to pay attention even to the bits that might be slow, training, or in this case retraining my mind, after how social media has left it in an almost unusable state after all of this years, (btw trying to stay away from social media has done wonders for how long I can stay focused, it's an everyday battle I mostly win, but also sometimes I lose and literally get lost for hours).
And that is not to say that I wasn't reading before but I was more trying to approach it from a purely project based perspective, where I would only learn what I needed. And it works also, but since I started this Shu path I've felt more comfortable and more confident with my work. Now as to music, Man! I can now at least identify some things and can follow along and am starting to improvise, which was beyond my wildest dreams before, obviously I have a lot of way to go, and still am not very fond of purely theoretical approaches, but for crafts like coding and playing music, I think this method is yielding the best results, now of course, I'm still to get to the next steps, but for now I get glimpses of my intuition and my sense of confidence in things I do to be there, sometimes is not there, not every day I feel this way, jajaja, I think its about half of the time I just feel like an impostor but again that's where I remind myself that I'm just a student in this dojo.
Now if you're wondering where to start, I can't tell you, jajaja sorry! however you want to or can learn it's up to you, but for me, I'm trying not to overthink it and I usually just start with book titles: "Start with...", "Theory of", "Mastering...", "The hard parts of", and then read a couple of reviews before committing to a book or material.
“Know the rules well, so you can break them effectively.”?
Dalai Lama XIV
You'll be surprised to learn that this entire issue was created by a Human Interface known as Luis (hi there! ??) which leads the score as follows:?
Luis - 10
chatGPT3/4 - 0
Now before you leave, let me tell you about some other projects I have in store just for you ??
I apologize if there are some fortune cookie advices in this piece, hold me accountable to that, don't take my word for it, try it out, think for yourself and see you in practice!