Slowly but surely

After several days of seemingly endless struggling, I started to make progress today.

I’ve spent the last two days pulling swathes of example programming to pieces - not so much asking “does it work”, as much as “how does it work?”.

Using a car engine as an analogy, instead of asking “does the engine work”, I’ve been asking “how does a spark plug work?”, “how does fuel get to the spark plug?”, “how does it ignite the fuel”, “how does that drive the pistons?”, “what are the pistons connected to?”, “how does the gearbox work?”, and so on.

After two days struggle, I’ve begun to understand the whole. After watching endless tutorials, writing endless notes, and using the knowledge to piece together a working prototype out of the computer equivalents of sticky tape and string, I’m beginning to understand.

I need to be careful now.

I’ve been here before. As soon as you start making any sort of meaningful progress there’s a huge temptation to keep going - to burn hours, days, and weeks crafting an invisible software engineering marvel that nobody will ever see.

I need to engineer occasional escapes from the code. Meetups with friends. Quiet walks. Perhaps even pull on the running shoes. We’ll see.

p.s. I might have ordered myself a Nintendo Switch