That A-ha moment!
Also known as “Eureka effect”
Since I’ve writing a lot about feelings in this journey to become a developer, let’s talk about the best feeling ever, that “a-ha” feeling when your code works.
I don’t think I can fully put it into words how it feels, but I can remember the first time I experienced it and that was long time ago, so let’s rewind…
I was about 5 years old when my dad bought our very first computer, he was always a tech person and while all my peers would be playing in their latest consoles like “master system II” or “mega drive” I would be listening to my dad explaining and showing me what a motherboard is and all the hardware components, or looking at the black screen of MS-DOS loading my favourite game, or Windows so I could scribble on paint.
Initially my dad would write the command lines for me, problem was when he was at work.. then I couldn’t load anything.
So one day, he wrote the command line in a paper and left it for me to copy and try to load the game on my own, it felt daring but I pressed the “on/off” button on the CPU tower and then on the screen and just waited patiently for it to initialise and for the prompt so I could then having my moment to shine.
I looked at the paper on what looked like Chinese to me and just started writing every single character of that command line, I then pressed enter and.. nothing happened. I looked carefully and couldn’t figure out why it didn’t work but then I realised I had a typo — believe it or not, it still happens more often than I would like — and this when I experience the “a-ha” feeling, I pressed “Enter” and I could finally play the game I really wanted to!
Now, as a developer that “a-ha” feeling is even more empowering, being able to solve something that doesn’t work for whatever reason and make it work, it’s absolutely glorious and quite addicting in a way.
