As a musician, I’m trained to be detached from the effort.
You spend hours in the day practising a single piece of composition, equivalent to 30 seconds of music. Tomorrow, it’s like you see these notes for the first time in your life.
You spend months practising a composition, which is 7 minutes of music. Your professor is quite satisfied with how you play it, so you perform it at a small concert-alike event in your school. But that day, you did poorly on a math test, argued with your BFF, and your stomach hurt because you forgot to eat. Those 7 minutes turn into seven long years of sheer hell for you and mild torture for everyone else. Thank god it’s only 7 minutes.
You spend more than a year preparing for an entry exam for a prestigious academy abroad. You practice a minimum of six hours per day. You performed the whole 45-minute program publicly as many times as you possibly could. Even your grandma knows it by heart. Your parents were saving money to pay for your travel and stay there, just for that one night. You’re paying attention to every detail. You don’t cut your nails too close to the event to make sure that the “feeling of the keyboard” stays the same. The stakes are high. So high, you can’t breathe. All the effort, all those hours, yours and everyone else’s, all that money, everything will be for nothing if you don’t bring out your best self at precisely those planned 45 minutes.
You have a 50% chance to make it all worth it. And 50% chance to make it all for nothing. 100 or 0. It all depends on your ability to focus, keep your hands warm and dry, handle the pressure, and memorize a whole book of music sheets, including professor’s notes. And relax, for god’s sake! If you’re not relaxed, you’re gonna fail for sure.
If you fail, how do you live with yourself? How do you look in the eyes of the people who invested so much in you? How do you justify your past year and all the time you spent with that instrument?
It is the business of creating. You need to be ready to throw it all away and start again. For better or for worse. You accepted all the terms and conditions when you joined the ride. Small print.
It’s not just us musicians. I’ve been listening to this podcast made by writers for writers, Writing excuses. It’s the only podcast I’ve been able to keep up with, and I can’t recommend it enough, whichever profession you’re in. A lot of things they talk about I’ve been able to translate to my music and development life. And the one thing they keep repeating throughout the seasons is cutting out parts of your book. Chapters even. Or rewriting the whole thing. And being at peace with that.
But that’s just for the arts, right? That doesn’t apply to my code because it is well-thought-through and based on logic, surroundings, and the whole application. It considers many edge cases, possible missing values, performance, accessibility, and best practices. My code fixes the problem and does not introduce bugs. It’s the best code I have written so far. Not just beautiful to look at but as elegant as it can be.
Relax! It’s just code.
If you’re ready to consider it outdated in 6 months, then you should be prepared to consider rewriting and improving it today. You should be open to suggestions on how to improve it; you should consider the possibility that there are cases you didn’t cover or that, in this particular situation, it is not the best possible solution. You should be at peace with deleting it all together.
If you’re not ready to delete your code, you’ll be a nightmare for every code reviewer, every team member, and every project lead who works with you. Moreover, you’ll never move forward. You’ll have difficulties learning new things, grasping new concepts, adopting new features and, generally, improving yourself. You’ll spend all your energy protecting your code and defending your way of thinking. The energy that would be spent far better in improving it. You’ll stop enjoying writing code. You’ll forget why you even started in the first place.
Relax. It’s just code.
It’s not you, not your brain, not your intelligence, definitely not your baby—just code.
YOU can be much bigger than that.
To all my fellow coders who got stuck in their code
P.S. I did pass that academy exam but didn’t get in because I was the second on the list, and they accepted only one. Nevertheless, it was the best performance of my life. I was never so relaxed, before or after. Was it all for nothing? I gave 100% of myself and had the pleasure of seeing what 100% of me looked like. And it was marvellous.