I recently saw this tweet on x dot com.

For those who do not know, the OP means programming is a rat race like the JEE exam (for my non-Indian audience, JEE is an extremely competitive college entrance exam), and calling out youtubers // influencers who are in the active process of making this an even more evident rat race, just to extract a few extra bucks.

You can do it by yourself

I remember taking a JavaScript course in my early days (5–6 years ago) for $3.73, and I only took it because it was so cheap. I did almost complete it but I remember not being able to recall anything when making my own projects. The real learning I got was from stack overflow (chatgpt didn’t exist back then), reading documentations and going through github repos. But I was only able to do these things because I found it to be fun.

Some of the most cracked people I know have taken 0 courses. They just learn it by their natural interest. Even though JEE is a LOT more tougher than getting a job, the most intelligent people I have ever met have the capability to excel in that exam without any further tuition, This is because they have a natural interest in physics and maths, unlike 98% of the competition, who are forced into it.

Enjoy developing stuff

Even when I start in college this year, I do not think about getting the most money. I have enough belief on my skills to know I would have a good paying job.

Instead I try to have as much fun as I can making projects that I find interesting. I do not have any goal of shipping software for millions of user, becoming “cracked” or even just earning massive amounts of money, I just try to have fun. I have shipped like 1 half baked project for my school’s competition and have done 10 leetcode problems last year. And I still got like 3 job offers somehow? And that too when all I was making was a text editor in C, completely different from the job I was approached for.

There is no need for all projects to be some form of web sass slop that shows how capable you are in gluing together postgres with react. Sometimes its just the random toy projects or “reinventing the wheel” kind of projects that give the most yield.

Another way to make development fun is to sometimes be your own project’s user. I developed holmes for my school’s compeition and tailored it so that the non technical leads do not have problems with the administrator ui. A year before that I created this neovim plugin called prism, which I am pretty sure I am the only user left, to create custom colorschemes easily. Right now, at flora, we are making orchid, a meme editor specifically for low end devices because dingboard runs at 4 fps.

It is fun to be competent

You know what’s actually more fun? Being good at something. Not in the “I can recite every React hook from memory” way, but in the “I can actually build stuff that works” way. If you would have asked me what competence means in my early days I would have said it means being able to do a leetcode hard of the top of your mind or knowing every javascript framework that exists. But that is just another flavor of the rat race mindset.

People think if they force themselves to do this particular thing day after day, they ought to get better. The funny thing is, competence is more valuable when it is not forced. When you build things because they interest you, you end up learning the underlying principles without even trying. Like, I probably learned more about state management from building that stupid meme editor and a crypt hunt site than I would have from watching 50 React Query tutorials. And the best part? This kind of learning sticks. It’s not like cramming for JEE where you forget everything the moment you walk out of the exam hall. When you learn something because you needed it to make your weird little project work, that knowledge becomes a part of your toolkit forever.

So yeah, competence isn’t about a github profile with a lot of followers and commits. It’s about building stuff that interests you until, one day, you realize you accidentally got good at it.

Go beyond

The thing about programming that most “roadmap” YouTubers won’t tell you: it’s actually pretty wild how much cool stuff is out there beyond your typical web dev stack. Beyond CRUD there is this entire universe waiting to be explored.

The beauty of our computer science is that you can just… wander off into random domains. I have been reading this book on compilers since a few months just to make a toy programming language. Have I succeeded yet? No, but it is fun. One day I read a 20 minute blog on how someone solved the Advent Of Code on their retro console. I do not even have that console but it was interesting reading about how hard it is to code under A LOT of restrictions. This kind of exploration keeps programming fresh. When you’re feeling burnt out from your 100th API endpoint, maybe take a break and just read about other unexplored fields. Sure, not everything you learn will be immediately “useful”. But that’s not the point. The point is to keep that sense of curiosity alive, to remember that programming is this vast playground where you can explore whatever catches your interest.

And maybe, who KNOWS? Maybe that random blog you read on optimizing caches helps you in your job as well. Or maybe it won’t. Either way, you had fun learning it, and that’s what matters.

Credits

1. quantinium and oblivious for proof reading and helping with grammar.
2. zoriya who wrote a banger on this topic already.