When coding flowers

Hello World!

Unfortunately you cannot change your mother tongue or the other tongues you had to learn forcibly in school. Fortunately you have all the choices to choose more tongues of liking. French or Chinese, one can choose to learn a new language for many reasons. It could be for love, profession, religion or just for fun. The same applies to any skill. Some skills are easy to learn, some skills have a wonderful ecosystem to support learning while others may need the luxury of resources. Skills get caught in a tug of war with three contestants pulling - our biology, the market/economics & our psychology. The fun fact is, it is not the skill that is being pulled at the center, but us - the individual. So how to enjoy the game without being torn apart by these three forces? Let’s talk about coding to explore this. Don’t worry! This article contains no code & I won’t ask you to learn coding.?

Reverse engineering ABCD

Why does Lego have an image of the completed model on its boxes? To inspire people to start building! Same is the case with jigsaw puzzles. Why don’t our schools or colleges use this simple psychological trick to teach? I am lucky I learnt web development (making websites & stuff that you see on the internet) under Jigar sir. While teaching Jigar sir’s emphasis was on two main things. One, ‘Learn to read code’ he used to say - the ABCD or knowing your Lego pieces. While at the same time he used a web portal (think Zomato) as an example or the final Lego model, aiming at which we learnt building. So along with - A for ‘Apple’ - it is best if we can have an easy to remember end result in mind. Call it the big picture or something that we will cherish to see completed.

Celebrate mistakes

Coding celebrates mistakes. Programmers don’t dread bugs or mistakes. But rather they dread its absence! Feedback is very instant & direct in coding. Coders need not wait till they complete building. But keep testing each step, little by little to see if things are working or not. One may say this could not be applicable in cases where the building process or certain skill practices cannot be stopped once started. This is where a good teacher can help break learning into bite sized pieces. When my cousins taught me cycling, my first lesson was to learn to push or walk a bicycle. Next I had to walk with one leg on the ground, one on pedal & so forth. In cooking, I knew I would forget things for sure. Hence I began trying dishes with least processes, then gradually trying dishes with more processes or complexity.

Introvert, extrovert, pikavert, one size fits all

Take arts or marketing for example. A lot of what you do, will depend greatly on the subjectivity of others as well as yourself. This complicates learning a bit because if the sync between the learner & tutor is not smooth things hinder learning. Another reason why I dropped out of college was for not wearing socks. Formals were compulsory then. If you don’t wear socks you become an outstanding student! Humans are complex. Machines are simple. Mainly machines don’t mock you, make you wait or judge. Hence with coding, it is just you & your computer. Thus, making mistakes or learning from them becomes way easier.

The creators’ brotherhood

If coders built temples or churches then it would be for Stack Overflow, YouTube & to the universe of open source initiatives. As I mentioned in my previous point, learning from mistakes is easy & fast in coding. To speed up this process comes a peer-to-peer support ecosystem through Stack Overflow or Quora. If you are stuck with a bug or error, you can just Google to see plenty of solutions provided on Stack Overflow. You will also be surprised to see that some have made the same mistake a week ago, a year ago or even decades ago! The Nobel Prize will fall short of funds if it started awarding peace prizes for coders who made getting help or helping others super easy & ecstatic. Similarly you will find tons of code available for free which you can use for free & share with the world. Want to create a social media, a chat application, even a search engine? Then either you can choose to use free frameworks or build from scratch.

Freedom of choice

I met Jigar sir after learning under four different other tutors. None of them had a Lego like approach I mentioned before. Instead of teaching first then taking exams or exercises, a DIY or life specific approach to teaching or learning goes a long way in today's dynamic economy. Hence I said coders revere YouTube & even apps like Udemy. If you know what Lego model to build, then you can find lessons or how-to's on YouTube for free or in a more structured manner on sites like Udemy for the cost of a Pizza or coffee (400 to 600 Rs. as of last month). YouTubers also make their coding lessons as modular as possible so you can consume at a convenient pace & give them better reach. The only knack to know is ‘Know what you are looking for’ & ‘Know how to search’. This applies to general searching on Google as well as ChatGPT. The biggest freedom? You don’t need a degree or college for this.

You get visions!

Coding is not just all syntaxes or math. It is poetry too. Like serial killers, coders also leave their signatures. One knows which bcustard’s pudding is this by looking at the code. At times you write 50 lines of code. Then you laugh at yourself when you figure out or see it could be done in just a few lines. While coding Bhushan.am I was stuck for two days at an algorithm. The solution struck me later that day at 3 AM & you just jump to code it. Most often solutions come to you when you least expect it, especially in a least expected form making one wonder if one had consciously thought of such a solution.

Commit, deprecate, commit

That translates to learn, unlearn, relearn. Coding evolves fast. You know it better when I point it to AI & how fast it is growing. You code something or build with Lego just to realize that suddenly a few blocks disappeared. And your tower falls. It is common to see functions or basic blocks of a programming language getting deprecated or scrapped for betterment. Many open source tools have gone obsolete. In such cases coders need to relearn & rewrite things. Coders need to be updated of trends & tricks as much as an ad man needs to. Other things like planning, taking risks better, etc, come on its own while coding. The point to note is learning, unlearning & relearning becomes easy when supported by an ecosystem.

Opportunity awaits the takers

I am reminded of Linux (ancestor of many operating systems) inventor Linus Torvalds’s quote below

Though I see many potholes, I want to share the opportunities I see -

Inventing more Legos - I know I said modular courses or tutorials are available for free or at minimal costs over YouTube or Udemy. They are not enough. Learning needs to match human desires. For example, not everyone wants to mindlessly automate something. Some may want to create an Uber like Estimated Time display for hospital waitings. While some may want to dedigitize moments of play for kids.

Co-piloting creation - Learners, coders & creators come in all shapes & sizes. Their needs are varied & the level at which they are in their making/learning phase varies. In the gig economy, tutors don’t entertain such service requests because teaching regular vanilla curriculum is more profitable for them. Meanwhile tech-support providers focus on bigger companies for revenue. This is where consultants can act as co-pilots of creation, helping coders or any type of maker in any skills, to be their co-driver navigating creation as a service.

Making learning fun - How can we implement or use the strengths of coding mentioned in this article into other skills? I am just summing up the same below for clarity so we can try to use it in our respective expertise -?

1. Fast feedback - How can you improve feedback loops for learning in other expertise or skill areas? If feedback takes days then how can we reduce it to hours? If it is in hours then can we bring it minutes?
2. Peer support - Clear, transparent, easy to get & give help, has been the major backbone of coding. How can we take this into other skills?
3. One size fits all - If a skill is leaning more towards one type of intelligence or personality type, how can we democratize it for more people?
4. Lego like learning - How can we foster a reverse learning or DIY approach to learning along with traditional formats?
5. Humanizing unlearning & relearning - When a profession or job becomes obsolete, it doesn’t happen overnight, at least for now. How can we identify such changes faster & help affected people to jump back to work?

Ikea ko bye kea, khud ka furniture khud banaya

If you are an Indian living in India, imagine telling your family or friends - ‘I am going to become a carpenter, glass blower or a poet!’ The common response one can expect to receive is that of shock & worry from our beloved, especially with AI writing poetry now. Even if you have a supportive base at home, the next worry could be - ‘Where in India or how I am going to learn glass blowing? How will I make it big?’ If a culture or nation is obsessed with just making it big, then it loses ingenuity. Just look at the great Indian business, unicorns or entrepreneurs that we celebrate today. Most of them are just desi versions of a firangi idea. As a nation, as humans, for our own wellness, we need to spawn & celebrate diverse skills more. We need to kindle a large-scale DIY & makers movement that invents newer skills, with great urgency.

When bamboo blooms, its end is near

When coding blooms