DEV Community: Sanchi

"Comparison, Compared - The Loop That Keeps Pulling Me Back"

Sanchi — Sat, 26 Sep 2026 13:10:16 +0000

_Part 4 of an honest journey from zoology to code — this one's written from inside the struggle, not after it.

**It's 11 PM and I'm not writing code. I'm scrolling.

Someone on my feed left their corporate job eight weeks ago. Today they're announcing their first freelance client. Python, they say, in two months. Determination, they say. Consistency. A five-step plan I could follow too, if I wanted.

I open Kaggle next. I don't know why — habit, maybe, or something worse. Somehow I always land on the same kind of content: a grandmaster being interviewed, talking about the competitions they've won, the money they're making now, more stable than most full-time jobs. I didn't go looking for this person. I never do. It just shows up, like it's waiting for me.

I scroll down to check my own rank in the competition I've been chipping away at for weeks.

Not top 50.

Not top 100.

I close the tab. I already know what happens next, because it's happened before — ten days, fifteen days, more than once — where I just... stop.

Nobody really talks about this part. The part where you know the comparison is unfair and you do it anyway. The part where you stop for two weeks and come back ashamed, telling yourself it's the last time, knowing it probably isn't. The part where you're still staring at a blank cell some days, not because of anyone else, but because you genuinely don't know what to write next. So I'm writing it down.

The laptop stays shut. The notebook stays wherever I left it. I tell myself I'll come back tomorrow, and tomorrow becomes a week, and I go back to scrolling job listings in my actual degree instead, the ones that don't ask me to prove anything I haven't already spent five years proving.

Here's the part that embarrasses me most: I know better. I know those two-month success stories are the rare ones, dressed up and repeated because they're rare, not because they're normal. I know a highlight reel isn't a timeline. I tell myself this every single time.

And every single time, I compare myself anyway.

The loop

This isn't a one-time thing. It's a pattern I could set my watch to.

I get demoralized. Not just frustrated — a heaviness that sits on the whole thing. Code stops looking like a problem to solve and starts looking like a weight. Some days I open the editor and my eyes get heavy within minutes, like my body is trying to get me to stop before I even start.

Even the AI tools I learn from keep telling me the same thing: build projects, push them to GitHub, let your work speak for you. I know they're right. I still don't do it. Not because I don't understand why it matters — because by the time I'm demoralized enough to need the advice, I don't have anything left to act on it with.

I stop — ten days, fifteen days, sometimes more. I come back guilty, behind, rusty. I open a leaderboard or a "how I did it" post within the first hour of returning, as if to punish myself for the break. And somewhere in there, the same two questions show up, quiet but constant: Will I ever actually get anywhere with this? Will I always be the one who never quite makes it as a coder — and will this path even take me where my dreams actually are?

I don't have an answer to either one. I just keep asking.

The pain of losing that no one prepares you for

Nobody tells you that most of the time, you lose. Not in a dramatic way — just in the quiet, unglamorous way where you put in hours on a Kaggle notebook, tune what you can, submit, and watch your score sit somewhere in the middle of a leaderboard that doesn't care how long you worked on it.

There's no error message for "you tried and it wasn't enough this time." No traceback. Just a number, and the number doesn't move the way you hoped.

I've spent 2-3 hours a day on this — reading documentation, debugging notebooks, redoing the same feature engineering step five different ways to see if it changes anything. Most of that time doesn't show up anywhere. It doesn't show up on the leaderboard. It doesn't show up on GitHub, because half of it never gets pushed anywhere. It just disappears into the next attempt.

That's the part that's hard to explain to someone who hasn't done it: losing at code isn't one big failure. It's hundreds of small ones, stacked up quietly, that never really announce themselves as "you lost" — they just look like a rank you didn't reach, again.

The bind nobody puts in the two-month success posts

Here's the thing those posts don't tell you: most of us aren't choosing between "quit your job and go all in" and "give up." There's a much less glamorous choice sitting in between, and I'm sitting in it right now.

If I take a job — any job, even one that has nothing to do with code — I lose the hours I currently give to practice. If I don't, I have no income, and eventually that stops being a minor inconvenience and starts being the thing that decides everything else.

I know, logically, this doesn't have to be permanent. I know people learn in the margins — evenings, weekends, stolen lunch breaks — and still get there, just slower. Slower has never felt like enough when I'm the one living it, comparing myself to someone I've never even met.

Where I actually am

I don't have a resolution for you. I'm not going to pretend I closed my laptop, breathed deep, and came back stronger by morning. Some stretches I don't come back for two weeks.

What I can tell you is I'm still here, writing this instead of the code I haven't opened this week. That's not nothing. Some days it's the only thing I've got.

Still learning. Still stopping. Still, somehow, coming back.

If you've ever stopped and started again on something you care about — coding or anything else — how many times has it been? And when you were in the middle of stopping, did you ever wonder if the path was even the right one? I'm asking because I don't know yet. I'd rather hear it from someone else than pretend I have an answer.**_

"SyntaxError,IndentationError-The Errors That Almost Broke Me"

Sanchi — Sat, 12 Sep 2026 11:11:38 +0000

Part 3 of an honest journey from zoology to code — the errors nobody warns you about.
_

I said last time that errors were coming. They came.

Red text. Everywhere. SyntaxError. IndentationError. And a dozen others I still can't fully explain, even now. Some days it wasn't even a real problem — it was one word, one letter, one missing colon. That's it. That's all it took to stop me completely.

And the worst part? Sometimes I'd sit with one error for days. Not hours — days. Reading it over and over, changing things at random, hoping something would just work. And when I finally found the fix, it was always something so small it made me want to scream. One letter. One space. One tiny thing I'd been staring past the whole time.

I got frustrated in a way I didn't expect. Frustrated enough to want to throw my laptop across the room. Frustrated enough to cry, more than once. There were days I closed the laptop and didn't touch it again for a while — not hours, days. I told myself I was done. That this wasn't for me. That maybe I should just give up and go do something I already knew how to do.

But I kept coming back.

Not because I suddenly got braver or smarter. I just... came back. After a few days, after the frustration cooled off, I'd open the notebook again and start from wherever I'd left off, still confused, still slow, but there.

And somewhere in that cycle, I learned something I didn't expect to learn: errors don't go away. Not for beginners, not for people who've been doing this for years. Everyone gets stuck. Everyone stares at red text feeling personally attacked. That never fully stops.

So if you're learning to code and you feel like giving up — you're allowed to. Be angry. Cry if you need to. Close the laptop for a few days if that's what it takes. That's not failure, that's just what learning this looks like sometimes.

Just don't stay closed forever.

Because when you finally push through an error that's been sitting on your chest for days, something shifts. You feel a little braver. A little more willing to try the next hard thing. Enough, eventually, to share your work with people even when it feels too basic, too beginner, too naive to show anyone.

And when you do — you'll know it's yours. All of it. Every clumsy, self-taught, hard-won line of it. And there's always more room to get better from here.

Still learning. Still getting stuck. Still showing up anyway.

"def,drop,obs,abs-The Words That Broke Me First"

Sanchi — Mon, 17 Aug 2026 12:09:46 +0000

_ Part2 of an honest journey from zoology to code-no one told me where
To start._

I started my Kaggle journey with Python. directly. No steps before it, no one behind me pointing the way.

Everyone I know is from commerce, arts, biology, or math. None of them speak this language. So when I opened my first notebook, there was no one to ask, "Is this normal?" No mentor, no course, no one checking my work. Just me, a notebook, and way too many tabs open.

I didn't know what I was looking at. Didn't know where to start, what to click, or what I was even supposed to be doing. The code just sat there and stared back at me, like it was waiting for me to know something I didn't.

I started with Kaggle's Python course, chapter by chapter: functions, loops, lists, conditionals. And here's the strange part — the tutorial part, I'd read it, understand it, nod along like, yes, this makes sense, I've got this.

Then the exercise notebook would open. empty, blinking cursor. And my mind would go completely blank. Like I hadn't read anything at all. Like the last ten minutes never happened.

Looking back, I think it wasn't just one thing. The logic didn't make sense to me, and neither did the words on the screen. Two problems at once, tangled together, so I couldn't even tell which one was actually stopping me.

'def'. What is that? Define what? Define how? I remember reading it three or four times and still not moving forward. I opened a new tab, googled it, read three different explanations, and still felt stupid. It was late, I was tired, and one word had stopped me completely.

'feature'. I kept seeing it everywhere, like it was obvious, like everyone just knew. Turns out it's just a column. Something I was supposed to look at, question, maybe fix. I felt silly once I figured that out.

'drop'. Drop what, drop where? Eventually I understood — drop a feature from the table, out of the notebook. Such a small word, carrying so much decision behind it.

And then came the short forms. 'obs'. 'abs'. I stared at both like they were in another language — turns out they were just observations and absolute values, hiding behind two lazy letters. Somehow, the shortcuts confused me more than the actual words did.

None of this was hard because it was smart. It was hard because it was foreign. In zoology, I never had to ask what a word meant twice. I knew a language there. Here, I was relearning how to read before I could even try to think.

I'm not writing this because I've figured it out. I'm writing this because I haven't, and some days that's the only honest thing I have to say.

Still confused most days. But a little less lost than I was last week.

And just when I thought I was starting to get somewhere — the errors started. Red text everywhere, messages I couldn't read, code breaking for reasons I still don't fully understand. That's a whole story on its own.

So if you've ever stared at an error message and felt personally attacked by your own laptop, stick around. That one's coming next.

I Don't Know How to Code. I'm Learning Anyway.

Sanchi — Tue, 11 Aug 2026 10:14:20 +0000

A_Zoology postgraduate's honest journey into the world of coding.

**I have a BSc in Life Science and an MSc in Zoology. I know cells.i know organisms.i know how to sit with a research problem and think it through carefully.

But code?not long ago, i couldn't even read a line of it-i didn't know what i was looking at, how it was meant to be read,or how it was meant to be written.

So why did i start?

Honestly-fear. i kept watching the world move faster,technology becoming the language of everything,and i felt something uncomfortable sitting in my chest. a quiet fear. what if i get left behind? not dramatically,not all at once-just slowly,quietly,becoming irrelevant in a world that was speaking a language i never learned.

That fear was the first reason.

The second was something harder to admit—I want to build my name in this field.i want a career here. I don't even fully know what that looks like yet. but the want is there.loud and clear,even when everything else is confusing.

And the third reason-the one that actually gets me through the hard days-is curiosity.a real pull towards this whole world of coding.i don't fully understand it yet, but something about it draws me in.

In the beginning,a missing comma or a stray hyphen made no sense to me. i didn't understand why they mattered,or how something so small could break everything.i'd stare at an error with no idea what i'd done wrong.

Now, slowly,i've started noticing those small mistakes myself-usually after i run the code and it breaks.it's a tiny thing.but it's mine.

So here i am.still at the beginning.learning on kaggle. making mistakes i'll probably write about here.

This blog is not a tutorial. i have nothing to teach you yet.

This is just a story told honestly, from inside the confusion.

I hope you'll read along.

_**