Groundhoginess of Coding

In this past week of coding, I’ve at times felt a bit like Bill Murray’s Phil Conners in Groundhog Day: trapped inside a never-ending loop while experiencing slightly different results based on little experiments and choices that I’ve tweaked.

Recursiveness, in other words. And what’s interesting to me, bracketing how it’s made me feel for a moment, is how the recursive nature of what I’m doing when coding–code, test, tweak, test, repeat–is a similar process to what the software will be doing once I’ve completed it: looping over and over again, tweaked by user input, events, or bugs. I’m drawn to this concept of recursiveness, and I want to sit with it for the next few weeks as I continue the dailies.

But how does it make me feel? I might answer that first by exploring how it doesn’t make me feel, which is to suggest that, when coding’s going good, I think I enter a bit of a flow state. I feel immersed in the work that I’m doing and loose track of time. I look up at the clock and it’s quarter after 10, next thing I know I make than damn ball bounce all around the screen and it’s 11:30. In a snap, just like that. To some extent, this comes from sentiments I share with thoughts Dianna shared on coding last week: even if I get the code right, I feel like I need to understand how before I move on. SO I get lost both in the actual exercise of coding and in the conceptual realm of understanding how the code works.

Like Aden, though, the not so cheery emotive response is peppered with frustration, a sense of being lost, and irritation. I got stuck trying to make that little ball bounce all around the page, and not just back and forth on a diagonal. My frustration an irritation scattered my attention as I searched for samples online to help me solve this little puzzle, or began and stopped a handful of videos that ended up being not so helpful. This sense of being lost expanded beyond the “I don’t get it” of learning code and creeped into a sense of I don’t even know what I’m trying to figure out anymore, leading me eventually to some necessary quality time reading Gawker. I go for the click-bait and linger for the comments.