How to program
In the beginning of coming back to programming in 2020 – 2021, I was learning and growing.
I was developing personal things but the main problem was that I was about to give up.
I learned from a friend from Vietnam who was a student here in Canada (Tan Vu / John) that I should adopt his mindset. His mindset was Vietnamese and was to never give up because the solution is out there in documentation or on Google. Programming was a combination of documentation, Googling and resilience.
I also learned you had to be open 100% with full transparency to learn overall. This openness allowed for everything really. For life and growth and a future.
I also learned you must learn to feel and do things your way and kind of mix up different thinking and perspectives from all over the world.
Your perspective at the end and reason to doing things makes you move forward. Also it has to be enjoyable and fun.
But at the beginning releasing software for the public, I met pretty negative people commenting on my work.
I ignored it because I actually liked doing stuff in programming and releasing things. I ignored the comments really. At then end comments are basically constructive.
I learned programming is a constant growing activity.
I did not know programming had this cool feeling after going to a certain level. After 4 years you don’t mind programming really. But to do web development is hell for me.
Tan Vu / John said something interesting to me about life. After a certain point in life and growth, life is the same. Basically you learn most of the skills and techniques in life for technicality and life. And probably work is just web development work for every programmer. Learning more and more. Hopefully, just taking time and relaxing over it LOL!
Tan Vu helped me so much over my programming career. I owe him.
He has more experience and more education than me and probably feels sorry for me as an old guy trying programming. And he helped me. He gave me the lifeline and trajectory. Gave me hints along the way to see ahead.
Other programmers and people helped too. I learned to be open 100%, I learned to think forward or at least try to think forward. I learned to work doing this job and that was the most eye opening thing.
Reflection:
Programming is hard and takes time to learn everything from different levels, school and different perspectives, different peoples and eventually getting to a points where you like it. You reach a point where you find it ‘easy’ relatively (after decades). You realize life doing this is pretty high at the top. You mature as a Vietnamese person realizing life is also education, skills and work but very high level.
Vietnamese people from Vietnam helped me realize I had in me a Vietnamese way to grow and develop and Vietnamese perspective in me too.
Without it I would be a mess thinking my way really which is the Vietnamese-Canadian born experience growing up in Canada. The Vietnamese-Canadian way (coloured born in Canada usually) consists of negative thinking and polar thinking and is race-based and competitive which makes people dislike and even hate each other when they are growing up and young sometimes.
Vietnamese from Vietnam thinking made me grow as a group with them.
Growth:
Keep at doing personal projects because that is the fun, very light, enjoyable way of programming and growth in life in the West.
It provides Vietnamese to see a different way to live and grow and experience programming I think. I mainly work with Western people for personal projects. And those projects have gotten published. This may mean something for some people. It doesn’t make money but it gets published in the West.
I have not experience programming at a company really. So I can not really comment on the growth and atmosphere of working like that.
So is living my way and programming my way good? I am not sure.