I spend so little time programming
I like programming. It's in the problem-solving part or in the "I'm cooking something amazing" part of my brain. It just scratches the right part of it that is enough to make me feel good about doing something challenging and doing it right. It's not hard, in the sense that I have to bring myself to do it, not normally. Normally I'm just glad to be able to program something.
With this in mind, I naturally went right into something tech heavy. My offers were all something called systems engineering, and I was blinding myself to the truth. You see, when you search systems engineering in wikipedia or in any other place, you will see that it's it's own branch of engineering. Engineering of systems, in the sense of systems thinking and designing. I love that. I was very looking into that.
But it also takes like a five minutes search to confirm that nope. The academic offer is for computer system engineering. Not SYSTEMS engineering.
I pretended to look to the other side. Like, that of course it would include something about systems engineering. That it would not be all about computers.
What's so bad about computers? I thought you liked programming?
Yeah, I like programming. I like computers. Back then I just didn't care what I was doing, but I was always told "you are always at the computer!". And I didn't mind. Weather it was messing around with the file system or doing stupid things on flash games, I was just at the computer.
But that was not all it, you know? I liked having my actions have a reaction at the computer. To do something and to feel like it did change something. This also applies to all thing in my life.
I'm some semesters in at systems engineering and I am currently going through one of the worst depressions in my life. I had those before, the worst one was in my last year of school. This is like, just one step before that. I'm not enjoying this. I spend so little time programming.
I spend most of my time "communicating" with teammates with the purpose of teaching me teamwork, while most of the time it feels like what I'm supposed to learn is how to deal with teams. I'm supposed to plan everything I do beforehand with diagrams and lengthy documents, just for all that to be thrown away in a week notice. We are using agile, sure, but we are required to document everything like it was waterfall.
The worst part of this is that it often feels like going to classes, the main part of university classes, are a waste of time. In these times it's expected that you learn everything all the time because that's just how the world advances here. There is always a new framework and a new technology around the corner.
And that's fine! I love innovation and trying new things. But we are expected to go out into the world with "just enough" knowledge in way too many areas at the same time.
I'm supposed to know how to do reactive pages with react, and to have it with vite of course. But just in case, let's make it typescript because typed is the future. But let's also learn how to use angular and vue because they are also necessary, but you should really be learning solidjs, preact or svelte because they are the frameworks of the future. Also, don't forget to use tailwind to style the page, but put some postcss. Also consider using htmx. We all use laravel here but to make it usable put filament in there, but also consider using nextjs or ambar for it. Also, learn how to do AI, so learn python. But not really because all you need to know is the libraries because python is just so easy. Use pandas, but remember to search for alternatives because no one likes pandas for some reason??? Or everyone loves it??? I'm just confused there. Of course you won't have time to learn pandas because you need to know how to use tensorflow, except tensorflow is too much much so learn pytorch. But also, they are being outdated by now so go search there, champ! We are not mentioning hardware here. I haven't even started on databases!
I settled that for my degree project I'm using rails with postgresql and add some reactivity little by little with stimulus, or maybe stimulus reflex. I want to keep my stack as slim as possible because, hell. I just want time to get good at something before being thrown into learning something new were I will be very bad because wth are you supposed to learn in one week? Specially when you also have all the other classes with one time?
I didn't mention that. Most of the time we are getting one week to learn a framework. "Just enough" they say, "in this area, you are supposed to learn on your own". I know! And I know my job right now is to learn. But I'm falling behind everyone else because I don't have the time to learn everything at the depth they request. I'm slow. I'm sorry.
"Just use AI" I'm being told. Both by students and by professors. To follow up on the documentation. To code. To WRITE messages to my teams. Why am I here then? Are you so cynical that you believe that all I want from my uni is a title? I want, to learn. I enjoy programming. I enjoy feeling good and competent at the thing I enjoy. I won't leave this joy to some machine just because it makes me more productive. I do use AI, sometimes. Mostly for learning because it's amazing at that, and that's what I'm supposed to do anyway. But I find myself more often than not, just using it for doing my coding and more, just to be done with it. I reached a point that I just want to be done with all of this.
It would be endurable if I got feedback. If I had enriching discussions with peers about the topics we are doing. I don't. The feedback is shallow most of the time. I have been told "its just... I don't know" and then got some bad grade. And I gave up on debates and talking about the classes because at this point it doesn't feel like it matters.
Burnout? Don't be stupid, what even is burnout? I took a semester off some time ago. It didn't feel good. I did it in the excuse that I would learn more about the things I was struggling with. In secret, I told myself I would give it my all into a project I really liked doing and launch it to fly and see how it does. I didn't do either. A semester went and passed and I didn't do anything remarkable with it. I just existed. I didn't do any coding back then. Not even the type of coding I like. I don't regret it. And that hurts, I don't regret doing something I actually enjoy.
Even now. Right now. Ten minutes ago. I was coding and got very very focused into implementing a feature that wasn't obvious in how I would do it. I decided to just, throw away the documentation and try solve it on my own. It wasn't a struggle, it was a challenge. I liked it. I remember very well why I like coding. And it just hurts much more.