What I Learned About Life by Learning to Code

Applying the Lessons of Programming to Real World Problems

My journey in life is a good deal longer than my journey in code, and yet, I feel at times that my understanding of the latter exceeds my understanding of the former. Life is vast, wonderful, and complex beyond reasoning. Code is limited in scope and necessarily decomposable into discrete pieces. You can build a web app in an afternoon, but there is no framework for prototyping a relationship. Writing an O(log n) algorithm to search an array is straightforward, but no such algorithm exists for finding happiness. Life is not object-oriented, or functional, or declarative — it defies classification. No, life and code are not the same thing — but that doesn’t mean we can’t learn something about the one from the other.

Over the last several years I have devoted an immense amount of time and energy to the craft of code. I’ve learned a lot in that time but the things that stick with me the most have nothing to do with 1s and 0s. What I know now is that the lessons of code are all around us. I’d like to take some time to go through a few of them with you. If you’re a coder, perhaps they will be familiar to you. And if you’re not, maybe you’ll be inspired to learn to code too.

Life and code are not the same thing —…