Why I, a non-major, am studying development

I think I’ve finished customizing Jekyll’s blog enough to make it useful, so I thought I’d delete the test post and write something. It’s a cliché, but it’s the first start of my own development blog, so I’ll try to roughly summarize why I, a humanities major, started developing. Um,,, I’ve never talked about the answer to “Why do you develop?” in detail even to friends and acquaintances, so I’m a little embarrassed to write it on my blog…😬

Why develop?

The rough and tumble definition of why I learn development is that I think it will free up my life so that the things I learn will stay with me and build up into a stack of skills that can be called a “stack”.

I wanted to live a life where I could be protected by what I had and have a certain amount of freedom, no matter where I was, because if what I could do was accurately represented by listing a stack, it would be mine, undeniably mine. If I had something that was clearly mine, I wouldn’t have to go to the wild places or places where I could excel, and if I was good enough, I could be recognized anywhere, anytime, anywhere… (although it’s important to be good and prove it).

After the corona outbreak, I didn’t want to go outside because I was sick enough to start self-isolating even though I didn’t have any symptoms, and I wasn’t that good at interpersonal grease, so I didn’t really think about sales or banking, where countless hypermotivated people are entering, and I wasn’t interested in public institutions because I know that I’m half-bone and it would be a pain to just do what I’m told. There is no stacked evaluation of my abilities, so if I spend a decade or two wondering if I’m good at this, I’ll end up wondering who I am beyond forty or fifty years.

So I like the fact that almost everything is measurable development, and it’s very refreshing to see that the person I was yesterday is different from the person I am today, and that’s very reassuring. Of course, it’s alien to what I’ve been doing, and it makes me want to shovel myself to death, but if I think it’s all going to help, that’s fine.

I don’t really believe in people’s aptitudes, so I think Ningen can do anything that just needs time, so it wasn’t a burden to start developing as a non-major, and I’m getting more and more confident that I’ll do well someday because studying doesn’t bother me (of course, I think that ‘someday’ will never come ;;)). I didn’t have many friends around me who were developing, but I’m meeting them little by little, and I’m not worried because there will be a lot of people to meet in the future.

What did you originally plan to do?

I originally wanted to be a journalist, so I did the school newspaper for a long time technically an independent magazine, and when I went to college for English Literature, I thought I’d be good at writing, but after about two years of pretending to be a journalist, I realized that I wasn’t very good at being brazen. You need to be tough to get information out of villains who are pressuring you with discipline and accusations, and you can’t be scared, and I was very nervous, and it takes a lot of courage to not be nervous. If I couldn’t do that in a small, socialized school, I didn’t think I could do it as a real journalist. I realized that if I became a journalist, I wouldn’t be able to stay true to myself and my personality.

In the end, I think I gave up my dreams and chose freedom. I chose the life I wanted to live over the work I wanted to do. I also thought that development would protect me to a certain extent, so I could be who I am. But maybe not…

Of course, I gave up being a journalist, but I still love writing, but as it turns out, making a living from writing is a different matter.

Non-majors, is it worth developing?

I don’t think it’s too difficult to learn. Of course, when you get deeper into it, it starts to get a little hectic and difficult because there’s so much to know…

You might think that it’s hard to study development because you don’t have enough computing knowledge or math and engineering basics compared to majors, but that’s okay because you can keep studying. Rather, it was a little difficult for me to have no one around me when I started, of course, I met quite a few friends who are developing now, but at first, there was no one to tell me whether the method was right or wrong, and I just kept trial and error.

I joined a web development club and met some people, but there are some friends who started developing in middle school, some who majored in computer science from the beginning of college, and some who started much earlier than me. Of course, if you put in the time earlier and more, you’ll be better at it, so I try not to compare myself to them, because I think it’s my pace that matters in the end… **I just want to do better than yesterday, plain and simple.

Wrap-up

This is a long post, and I found myself interviewing myself ;; I think I’ll get nostalgic if I keep writing, so I’ll cut it short and write about development next time…!