How Programming Helps Me Heal

Meditations on coding and self-transformation

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Over the last year I got back into various little programming projects. Most of it was fixes and tending to projects, from updating little apps to migrating my server, and some of it was trying out new tools. Most recently, it was some data manipulation in python, which I hadn’t really done since I was a researcher.

Usually, it begins with some task I need to do. Some feature I’d like to have or some error that I want to fix. I’ll google for that feature or I’ll copy/paste the error that shows up in the console into a google search. I browse through guides, DigitalOcean forums, Stack Overflow posts, or GitHub discussions or other forums for the tool. I tweak what I google, searching for the right thing to search. Then I copy/paste what I find into whatever I’m working on, making changes as needed. Then it works, or there are other issues and I repeat the process.

A variety of feelings show up along the way. I feel daunted and overwhelmed in the beginning. How will I figure this out? I haven’t done this before. Or if I have done a similar project, it’s been years. As I search for answers, curiosity turns to excitement as a solution comes together. Then that flow of iterating — testing, fixing, updating. And finally, if it works out, this burst of esteem from that…