It Is Not Working
It was suggested that I read the book Eloquent JavaScript while I was enrolled in a 6-month part time accelerated education program held at the University of Texas at Austin’s center for professional education. I was learning programming logic from an instructor named Osei Bonsu who had a degree from Texas A&M. Osei was the chief technology officer for a company that provided online services for students looking for courses. I was fascinated that he was not only the most valuable technologist at the company he worked for but also taught the class I was taking at The University of Texas at Austin. Osei never seemed to be tired and was always matter of fact yet passionate about teaching us from the late afternoon to almost 10:00 at night. He would rip apart a string and manipulate numbers right before our eyes during class and my peers and I had never seen such a thing. He was fast efficient and charismatic when it came to explaining exactly what the computer was doing to the values. I did not know exactly what I wanted to do yet in technology, in fact, I was somewhat lost in life, lonely, and had nothing to exert my surplus of energy into. I paid close attention to what he had to say because my future depended on it. It seemed liked I was in a race against time to get my life together and it was exhausting. I was working for a company that would not throw a bucket of water on me if I were on fire and although I had climbed my way to management through years of being exploited for my labor. It was still not enough. I remember learning how to program and coming across an error in my code, I would say to myself: “It is not working” and this correlated to my work life, my real life, and how I spent my time while I was not working. I would say to myself while working endlessly in an infinite loop: “It is not working.”
My fingertips would turn each page of Eloquent JavaScript containing knowledge I was not entirely sure I understood and with each page I turned I was not sure if I needed to go back and reread the page I had just read. Programming in JavaScript can be complex to say the least. There is quite the learning curve if you have never done anything in digital operations. Osei would recommend we all read Eloquent JavaScript and would ask throughout the school year who was reading the book and every time he would ask; I was the only one who had been reading it. I could understand why no one would read it because I often had no clue what was going while I was reading it. I was desperately trying to understand everything all at once and I was unable to comprehend if my brain was absorbing any of the material, I just kept reading it because that is what Osei had recommended. He could be blunt and egotistical at times, but I liked him, and he was extremely good at programming. I began to cherish myself more and more as this period of my life went on. I still felt it was a race against time to gain the skills necessary to leave the company I worked at so I can pursue other interests. I kept reading and would be presented with interesting illustrations by, Madalina Tantareanu, with each chapter that came to an end. It was a beautiful addition to the book and the first time I had read it I would be so lost in concept that seeing an illustration was like finding an oasis in the desert or in my case seeing a mirage. Such dry content at times and to be given something that was not a block of code or short cut explanation of a topic felt really hydrating. It gave me the inspiration that I had needed to move onto the next chapter. I was not exactly sure if Osei liked me. I think I wanted him to like me. I thought he was cool to give us a side mission of some sort while teaching class. I was more concerned with making sure I still liked programming. He seemed to love it and I would sway in and out of interest because I often felt uneducated in the presence of someone like him. I did not know what was going on most of the time and I tried so hard. At one point a student had asked him in class if there was ever a point when this sort of material would start to make sense, all of it, Osei normally had an answer for everything. He took a few moments to reply and said code every day, code all the time, and read eloquent JavaScript.
I coded every day, I coded all the time, and I had finished reading Eloquent JavaScript. Why did I still feel like I was a poser? Or an imposter. Someone who was trying to opt out of college to learn all these things in half a year. I asked my instructor why I still felt this way even when I read this 500-page 11-point font size monster. He literally told me to read it again. Read it again? I just finished this spell book, and it was not very enchanting. Osei explained to me it is not something that makes sense the first time you read it and at this point I was really starting to think that maybe programming was not for me. I could not think like others in the class. There were people who had not taken the time to read about everything the language of the web had to offer and excelled more than I. Reading Eloquent JavaScript had become such an emotional part of my life. As I started to re-read, topics would click with me but unlike how math or a sudoku puzzle might click with a person. It was like I was living in a house; I would turn on the lights, and briefly think about how electricity worked before getting lost in thought entirely. I did not know how electricity worked but I know that I had to turn on the lights, pay the electric bill, and sometimes change the light bulb. I began to think differently, and it fascinated me. I did not understand programming, but I was experiencing a psychic change, I was able to sort of understand myself and my life.
On my second attempt at reading eloquent JavaScript, I was beginning to write nothing but clean code as I was further along in the class. I had seen almost every example of every topic in the book in real life situations being worked out in front of me. I was someone who was putting in the work, but I still did not believe in myself and that is what was holding me back. I would read before class and one day Osei walked up to me and asked how I was and how my studies were going, and we began to talk for a moment about topics covered in the book. In that moment I did not realize I was talking to a CTO of a company about technology and it was a very fluid conversation. Deep down I still did not believe in myself. I had asked my instructor what it meant when programmers used the phrase “What hath god wrought?” As an output example when testing code. He did not know the answer either, so we took a minute to look it up together on the internet. It ended up being a phrase from The Book of Numbers (Numbers 23:23) and the first message that was ever sent in Morse code. Some programmers would use this as their go to text when seeing if what they were building was working. It was a special moment for me because I spent all day working for people that just saw me as a machine and in that moment, I was talking about technology with someone who knew what they were talking about. He took a moment to learn something new with me and it made a really big impact on my life. I had never valued education until that moment. I wanted to stop being a laborer and make a significant difference in the world and others lives. I wanted things to work, I wanted to keep my composure when things did not work, and I wanted to know what was making these things work.
“It is still not working” I said to myself as I was debugging my code. I hated that part of programming. Today, as an educator, I am still not all that good at it. I began to think about a time I was teaching a 12-year-old and had not seen a trailing semi colon in his code for two days. The entire time he was insisting that he hated programming. “Yeah, me too. I hate programming.” I came back from that thought and saw a trailing semi colon in my own code. Oh yes, wonderful. I hit the backspace button. Saved the project file and ran my application. JavaScript is the gift that keeps on giving. It is unlike other languages that will not run your code if there is a single mistake. It will run bits and pieces of your code leaving it up to you to find what went wrong. In chapter 8 of eloquent JavaScript, Bug and Errors, Marijn Haverbeke states “If a program is crystallized thought, you can roughly categorize bugs into those caused by the thoughts being confused and those caused by mistakes introduced while conveying a thought to code. The former type is generally harder to diagnose and fix than the latter.” He summed up errors very eloquently and referred to the computer displaying an error as: complaining. I like that and it was something I have kept with me throughout these years. Whenever an error pops up in the classroom, I tell my students “Oh, here it goes, yelling at us again.” It is kind of funny to think of an error in our code as the computer itself complaining or yelling. Marijn’s writing has helped me not take programming so seriously. In some way it helped me not take life so seriously. I could not read or understand Eloquent JavaScript in a single day, and neither could I learn the entirety of the language of the web. The second time I read the book I took my time and realized that my journey as a software engineer and web developer was a journey not a race and so was life.
Works Cited
Haverbeke, Marijn. Eloquent JavaScript: A Modern Introduction to Programming. No Starch Press, 2019.
“Bugs and Errors / Eloquent JavaScript: a Modern Introduction to Programming.” Eloquent JavaScript: a Modern Introduction to Programming, by Marijn Haverbeke, No Starch Press, 2019.
“The Books of Numbers (23:23) / The Holy Bible: Containing the Old and New Testaments.” The Holy Bible: Containing the Old and New Testaments, Trinitarian Bible Society, 2010.
