Recently a question has been troubling me: “What do I like? What fills my heart with life and makes me focus and work for dozens of hours straight?”

At first I thought it was programming, since it was love at first sight when I was 16, and it took a few years for that love to settle down a little (very little). But that only happened because of AIs, and I hear from programmers even more experienced than me that A.I. spoiled their work a little, since they also enjoyed programming.

But after all, what is programming? And why do some people like it so much?

Reflecting on this I came to the conclusion that these people, and I include myself among them, actually like creating, we like fitting together the rules of the universe and giving things “life” according to our abilities, and knowing that it was made with our own hands. We like knowing every detail of that system/screen’s behavior, we like being able to customize it as much as possible and have control over everything in there, it’s complexity bringing to life things that are important to humanity. We also like the hunt of learning as we go, of solving an endless bug and growing in the process.

And that’s programming: building on a challenge, using the rules of the computing universe as the engine for a final result.

Did you get it? Build -> that’s the secret

The best programmers I know are crazy about creating, studying, and practicing. They’re people who, if you say you need to see a real-time image in the middle of the Sahara Desert, will become curious about how to access public satellite data, how to process that data at extreme speeds and make it available online for free or at the lowest possible cost.

They’re people who create and study, and regardless of the day or time they’re curious people.

That’s how you study programming, be curious, throw yourself into varied, crazy, big, and complex projects. And then, evolve - day after day.