Chapter 1
Introduction

I’ve been had by code. Twice.

The very first time was when I took a programming class during my freshman year of college. It was a mandatory course for the curriculum I had decided to enroll in. It wasn’t like what I had seen in so many movies during my childhood. I didn’t type in a few simple commands, press Enter, and watch a trash-can robot say “hello.”

There wasn’t even a trash-can robot in this class. Instead, it was about pointers, memory allocation, and object instantiation. I was too in the weeds to see what all of it meant. However, the evidence was overwhelmingly clear: programming was not for me.

I wanted to be an artist or perhaps a mathematician. I wanted to be both creative and exact—both right- and left-brained, as they say. Programming seemed to lean too far to the left, and no other career options I could think of let me play in both worlds simultaneously. I was lost.

Just a couple years later, the Internet boom changed the landscape of programming. Suddenly, it was real-world, it was approachable, and it had a lot to do with design. It valued both artistry and logic almost equally. For the first time, I really could foresee myself enjoying this work. I could now channel my passion for creativity and logic into web applications. So, I returned to programming, albeit with great apprehension.

Truth be told, I also came back to it for an entirely different reason. For that two-year hiatus, I studied many other subjects that seemed to have too many unanswered questions. Devising the Grand Unified Theory in particle physics or finding the largest prime number? Impossibly ambitious and daunting undertakings, for sure. They just weren’t for me. In addition, that course on existentialism didn’t clear things up either. As a young adult, I simply wanted answers, not more questions.

Programming. The very subject I had once eschewed was now my refuge. After all, computer science was man-made. All the answers had to be there. I yearned for a career where answer seekers like me could thrive, where you turned elixirs of code into always-happy customers, comrades, and clients. The rules were already written. We just had to build. All the obstacles existed solely in code, I thought.

In my second return to programming, I was duped again, because this was certainly far from the truth.