When I was out of my first tech job, because they were bought, I took a python course. This is the spring of 2016. After that, I became basically the ‘Python expert’ in the team that I joined, and wrote a lot of scripts - including an RPM, and a refactoring of a very complex monitoring program into its constituent parts. Since then - for eight years? - I’ve felt like I’ve been very good at coding. Like - I was not a developer, but I also wasn’t chopped liver, you know? It was an extra skill, something I could lean on when I was having issues. But it wasn’t something I was perfect at. I didn’t really make programs for other people - I’d make them to run via cron, or for my own personal use, with the output being through a terminal.
After my sabbatical, I started applying to jobs again. And it made me realize something - I need to be better at coding. Not to replace the ops-first mindset that I have, but to be able to go into it, when I need to do something more involved.
And so, I went back to learn.
I’m 40 days into it now - going slowly, and letting myself fully comprehend and explore the problems I’m going through - and I can feel myself getting better at it. There’s a lot that I just wasn’t using - list comprehensions, for instance - or graphics, in general! - and there were things that I used but was a bit reticient to do so. It’s just always, tautologically speaking, simpler to do the simple thing. But I’m rewriting my brain a little bit - just to give it an extra gear when needed, and make picking up further programming languages easier. If I have a little time - why not make something make more sense? Do I need to write four if statements when I can loop through and resolve things with one elegant line of “more correct” code?
I put this second part to the test - I’d tried to write some Go code at my previous job but ended up being unable to write the terraform module I was looking at within a week, trying to go faster and faster and just missing parts of the language. So I came back, and I went, “Let’s write something that duplicates this python script, and just makes an API request.” It was frustrating to figure everything out. I ran into a bunch of bugs - errors with formatting, or the way the JSON object was accepted, or even the difference between httpget and httprequest(“GET”). But I was able, actually, to discern those things. I’m now more able to actually see what the problems are. And at the end of the day, I made my API request, and it was properly accepted.
I don’t know if this is just because I successfully got out of the burnout I had a little over a year ago, or if I just gave myself the information required, or even if the object was just that substantially different. But it feels good.
And I’ll be attempting making that terraform module again at some point, I’m sure. :)
You can’t build something that stands for a long time on sand. You’ve got to build the foundation first, and the things that stand on the foundation after.