I Don't Love Programming

- 1 min

I love what it enables me to do.

You don’t need to love programming to be good at it. You may love any of the following way more than programming:

What do all of the above have in common? Time.

Time is the most valuable commodity we have as people. It is something we can never get back.

I like traveling. I like spending time with my friends and family. I like watching FC Barcelona play. I also like “wasting”1 time on Netflix.

An example of a wasteful activity within programming is performing a repetitive task manually. A good example is search and replace. You can go manually find and replace N number of occurrences you want to change or you can learn your editor’s shortcut to do this instantly. This type of action might not seem beneficial in that moment in time but when added up over a long period of time, the compound effect results in big time savings.

You can apply this approach to many aspects. Whether its learning shortcuts for your editor or UNIX, the inner workings of Python or any other tool, the principle is the same.

You don’t have to love programming to learn your tools better. You don’t have to be a geek. You don’t even need to learn a bunch of tools or new technologies. Just the tools you use the most on a daily basis. Your time is invaluable.

I don’t love programming. I love the time it buys me for the things that matter the most. I’m sure you do too.

  1. A matter of perspective :wink: 

author selfie

Personal blog of Makis Otman

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