Something is missing

Table of Contents

Something Feels Wrong

This morning, when I was walking around the neighbourhood, something popped into my mind. I have a question: why am I feeling something is missing when I programme?

A few years ago, I left my kitchen career, came over to Canada, and tried to start working as a software engineer. Right now, I’m still unemployed. Recently, I found myself programming less. I do not want to start a new project, nor do I want to maintain the old ones, because I feel I am going nowhere.

I spent over 10 years in the kitchen. I can tell you cooking is a craft, but how do you define craftsmanship? I believe it means you do the same thing every day, and see incremental gains, then rinse and repeat.

Programming is not the same

But programming feels like a journey. Each journey should be unique, only rhymes but never repeats. Each new project means you are creating an artefact to solve a problem and maintain it forever and ever. It is more like an architecture than, let’s say, a piece of sushi that will be consumed and recreated by the same person.

Now with Vibe Coding, this feeling is even stronger, more than ever. We are focusing more on the result than the process. People are very proud of one-shotting an application. Who cares about what happened in between? We only need to see the end product.

Solving Puzzles Is a Craft

Just as I was feeling hopeless and frustrated, something came to my mind, something that I’m not supposed to like, and that is LeetCode. Suddenly, I found LeetCode to be somewhat like a craft. You can get better over time. You can see the progress, and you can definitely study it.

It is time for me to put on my Python hat, start solving the puzzles, and get better at it over time. It gives me some meaning to programming instead of just prompting.