The Healing Power of JavaScript | Hacker News Reader

The Healing Power of JavaScript

wired.com

93 pointscmod19 comments

I resonated with this. There's something calming and comforting about creating little worlds, tending to them like a garden of living things. It can be a peaceful activity, conjuring concepts in the mind, moving and arranging shapes, letting them loose to run on local and remote machines. When it's working well, there's a kind of clarity and purity achieved, that is tough to find in the messy "real" world.

I wish I resonated with this. It would definitely make me a better programmer because I would code a lot more. I unfortunately look at it like an exhausting thing that I only do when I have to. Most of my time is spent playing basketball or watching hbo/netflix/youtube =(

That's totally fine. Not everyone should code all the time or think about it that way.

I have both experiences - it can be painful when I dont have time put away, distractions put away, and I need to have some investment in the project, some skill enough in the tools to not be stuck in documentation hell.

With those conditions it really is like a garden, slowly improving or changing things as you observe the need.

That being said, part of it is also appreciating the outputs of one's labor - not implying you don't - but I see many programmers who are only satisfied with instant solutions when the amount of work needed to solve any problem would be significantly larger, they get bored, and they walk away from the problem.

To me that's generally because the problem itself isn't interesting enough on its face to get the programmer to want to solve it, and frankly if it isn't interesting enough of a problem... who cares about solving it?

As a non-programmer (work on the business side) I have enjoyed getting into code since the lockdown.

The infamous 'Automate The Boring Stuff by Al Sweigart' was one of my top reads last year and I have developed several products from it that I use to make my life a bit easier every day.

There is something nice about coding in that its black and white, ones and zero, where a lot of what I deal with is somewhere in the middle. Plus its nice to get away from Powerpoint and Excel and I get a bit of kudos with the Engineers (I stress 'a bit'!)

Currently working my way through Hands-on Machine Learning by Aurelien Geron.

This sounds lovely. As a student, I currently associate code with trying to get a problem solved in time constraints... And when I work on personal projects I'm always frustrated by lack of progress in the time I have to spend on it. I'm going to try and see if I can think of it more like your framing--work on something without worrying about time, just tending to it bit by bit.

I've been a little while out of doing side projects (I've always loved coding outside of work - but perhaps burnt myself an existing trading bot project). The last few months I've been building a multiplayer "io" type zombie survival game. and I've really fallen in love with coding again.

Solving these little puzzles (as oppose to just completing the project) is super rewarding. Time to add collisions, human damage, horde behavior, a HUD system.

Everything is like a little piece of a puzzle, it's interesting to compare it to something more analogue (such as an actual puzzle), it feels like it resonates after my various battles over the weekend.

I find this more true for projects with larger lifestyles than small, proof of concept things. For me, a long labor of love where I have to add improvements exactly like you described here over some big, complicated project can be healing. Smaller setups like integrating with other tools, building CRUD things, etc, just use up a lot of the same "polish the rough edges" energy that I need for work.

Title changed to 'the healing power of javascript' which not only undermines the text but also means it's too silly to share on social media now.

Probably it generates higher CTR :)

It's reg-walled anyway, which makes sharing on social media irritating for the receivers.

This is a wonderful article. It describes pretty well how I feel about coding and scripting and writing documentation for it all. Tech is often the small bubble in which we can hide, a refuge with clear rules and predictable entities which will never cast judgement upon you.

This is not surprising.

I was reading an article about an artist early on into the pandemic that mentioned he started a collection of peoms as his way of "processing" the pandemic.

Since I was writing some code specifically to track the Covid progression and estimate future evolution it resonated with me.

We all process the world with what we are and what we do. For some of us that included coding.

Chasing shrodenbug in someone’s else code atm. So much healing...

To get around soft paywall: https://web.archive.org/web/20210411150154/https://www.wired...

I'm code in my past time, and I'd say this is also my haven during this pandemic. Letting your imagination run amok amongst the disparities of our world is just therapeutic.

It must depend on the person.

Javascript makes me sick, instead.

I think the main thesis still works, as long as we add the caveat that the programming needs to be in a language and environment that the programmer actually enjoys.

... which is seldom JS.

That it was JS surprised me when I read the article. I was expecting to see assembly, C or Python (personal bias).

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