What I talk about when I talk about swimming and coding

What I talk about when I talk about swimming and coding

To many people, swimming is such a basic survival skill, but to me, it is not.
I think it's normal for people who cannot swim (yet) to have a sense of fear and urgency about being in the water without any anchors.

One day, trying to overcome my fear, soaking in the water and struggling to swim back and forth only 25 meters, then 250 meters, I came to realize how similar this feeling
is to learning how to code.

1. It cannot be rushed

With the help of Copilot, and various AI assistants , making a website, an application seems to be a piece of cake and in a blink of the eye.

The thing is, I cannot (yet) understand 100% of the code, the architecture (if any), or the long-term developments that should be planned for.

With swimming, of course, no AI support can help you at all. It's fully controlled by myself, how to breath correctly, how to float, how to keep my body in the accurate position,
hands and legs moving in perfect synchronization.

But, it feels good to have some progress, to be able to swim up to 250 meters from 0 (and to be more in the future, may be the short-term goal is to reach 1km eventually)
It should be the same with learning how to code.

I doubt that I have enough time to understand the fundamental logic of binary systems or memory management behind all of what I have written.
I always feel like the evolution of technology is moving too fast to grasp, fueling a rush to know everything instantly and forgetting the beauty of going slow.

1. Muscle Memory and Consistency

You can't learn to swim by reading a book; you have to get in the water. Similarly, you can't learn to code just by watching tutorials, you have to build.

Both skills require consistent, repetitive practice until the movements, whether it's a freestyle stroke or writing a clean TypeScript interface - become second nature.

Personally, it took me years to get over my fear and start going to the pool regularly. It actually gets better with frequent practice, as I mentioned, I can swim up to 250 meters now, so proud of myself.

And, when I first started the Open Full Stack course of University of Helsinki, I rescheduled it over and over, using my heavy course load and thesis as an excuse to delay it.

Until lately, when I graduated and consistently committed to studying it every single day for 2 months straight,
my brain gets adapt to the syntax, reading documentations and slowly doing the exercises instead of asking Gemini every time I feel stuck. I am proud of myself for the small progress, I should be.

Recommended for beginner like me: Full Stack Open https://fullstackopen.com/
Where you can learn thing slowly and independently

The title is inspired by the title of a book by one of my favorite authors: What I talk about when I talk about running (Which I haven't read yet since I am not into running, but I will give it a try)