7 Ways To Keep Yourself Motivated While Programming

Programming to be honest is not easy. It can be hard especially when you are stuck in a problem, or even when you have a bug and you don’t know a way out of it. I once wrote a project that had 400 lines of code and eventually there was a bug in it. I had to use bisection search to go through each of the lines of code to find out the bug. That one hour of work was very demotivating. You really need to be motivated to be a programmer, even while programming in python which is one of the easiest languages around.

People often ask me: “Nnaemeka David, what do you do to be motivated? Sometimes, it gets hard and frustrating?” So, I decided to write this post on some of the things one can do to get motivated while programming.

 

1. Be disciplined.

According to some dictionaries, discipline is the practice of obeying rules or a code of behavior. This skill is essential in programming because if you are not disciplined, you will end up in a lot of obstacles to your programming. Disciplining frees up your mind to think about solutions, and not just to rush into putting lines of code on an editor. Discipline makes you set up your programming defensively; you plan ahead for obstacles to your programming when disciplined. Discipline involves understanding the conventions of python as a programming language and following them. They keep you motivated. The style guide for python code, or sometimes called PEP8, is a good resource to instill discipline.

When I learned programming from Professor Eric Grimm at MIT, (online course), he kept emphasizing on doing tests and setting yourself up for defensive programming before you begin writing code. I have seen the wisdom of that as time goes by. It helps me to debug; and bugs are something you will find all the time.

If you are not disciplined, you will find yourself looking for a needle in a haystack. That is a very frustrating endeavor.

2. Start with the bare minimum.

Often beginners to python keep asking the question: Can I learn python in 3 months? What do I do to be a data scientist in the shortest space of time? I always tell anyone that asks me that they should go with the flow. Don’t force it. If you force it and you want to learn everything in the shortest time, you will get disappointed. Start with the bare minimum. Increase your aptitude as time passes by and your confidence increases. Otherwise, when it is 3 months and you discover you have not even scratched the surface of python programming, you will lose motivation. It is similar to when someone is working on the treadmill.

While working on the treadmill, you don’t just start all at once doing 3 hours at a go. First, you start with five minutes intervals and take breaks. Then, as your body gets used to the routine, you increase the time you spend. So it is with programming in python and any other language. My advice to anyone who wants to take a fast paced approach is that they might be setting themselves up for disappointment. Rather, you take it slowly, one step at a time. Don’t constrain yourself to a time limit, but regularity is the secret to success.

3. Try the Pomodoro technique.

The Pomodoro technique is a time management technique that encourages you to work using the time you have rather than work against it. For example, say you can spare 30 minutes for programming, what you do is you spend that 30 minutes and set a timer to alert you when the time is up. When it is up, you take a break, and when you can spare another 30 minute you continue again, setting the timer. Many programmers have confessed that the pomodoro technique helps them to be productive. It can also help you.

As programmers, we spend a lot of time in front of the computer and burn-out can easily set in, causing you to lose motivation. With the pomodoro technique, you will never get burned out because you are pacing yourself and taking breaks that helps you to get refreshed. Pomodoro technique also helps to boost your concentration and focus. There are a lot of softwares that implement the pomodoro technique and you can use them, like the focus booster app that runs on both windows and mac.

A programming friend of mine on a forum told me that he used the pomodoro technique to learn 3 languages in 2 months. You can try it out yourself.

4. Set goals.

There is a trite saying that if you fail to plan, you are planning to fail. I have found setting specific goals helpful in helping me to get motivated while programming. But you don’t want to be setting goals you cannot achieve like starting from zero to hero in python in one month. You would be setting up yourself for failure. Set SMART goals, that is, goals that are specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-oriented. After you have achieved one goal, congratulate yourself and move on to the next. Doing this, you will find python programming, or any other programming task, very enjoyable and fun.

When I started programming, one goal I set is to do one challenge on hackerrank.com on a daily basis. I succeeded in completing the 30 days of code challenge and also doing other challenges. On some days, I would really feel in high spirits, congratulating myself for moving on to the next level. Try it out yourself by signing up at hackerrank.com and take a challenge. If you are a new programmer, take the basic challenge. There are lots of languages to choose from at the website.

5. Projects, Projects and lots of Projects.

To boost your confidence level and set yourself up for the industry, you can never underestimate the value of doing projects. My advice is that you do projects, more projects and lots of projects. Sign up at github and look for projects to collaborate. There are even projects on github.com that accepts beginners. You could sign up for those if you are new to python programming.

If you don’t have ideas on what projects to do that would fit your level, just Google it. You will find all sorts of projects that you can choose from on Google; from beginner to expert.

If you keep going from tutorial to tutorial while on your programming journey, you will be disappointed in record time. You need to learn to practice. That is the secret to being motivated.

6. Love what you are doing.

You must be passionate about programming, in python or any other language, to survive in this industry. Without passion and love for coding, you would be disappointed in no time. It involves lots of screen time, sometimes it steals the time from your relationships. You could set yourself up for failure if you are doing it for the money because you will encounter a lot of obstacles in the programming journey.

Love programming. Write a line of code every day. In fact, to be motivated, you must love doing this and if you have read this post this far, I believe you love coding and want to improve. So congratulations.

7. Start teaching others about programming.

Teaching is a way of imparting knowledge to others. While you are teaching, you are improving your ability to use python and to learn python. Remember, as you are teaching others, you are teaching yourself. You are gaining benefits for yourself that are valuable.

Also, teaching others imparts other soft skills to you. By teaching others, you gain communication skills and presentation skills. While successfully teaching others, you increase your confidence in using python programming language and you also gain leadership skills. According to glassdoor.com, a job search site, these skills are in high demand in the programming industry.

If you cannot be part of a class to teach, you can participate in forums to help others. Forums like python-forum.io, freecodecamp.org, and Stackoverflow.com, can be of immense help to you to get teaching opportunities.

I wish you success in your programming career.

Why Shaving Blades Become Useless After Cutting Human Hair

For a long time scientists have been fascinated with one problem when it concerns blades. Although blades are made of stainless steel and have edges that are razor-sharp, to further strengthen them they are coated with diamond-like carbon, but a material that is 50 times softer than a blade such as a human hair can be able to make the blade useless over time. From a logical point of view, this should not be the case.

 

Intrigued by this problem, the engineers at MIT’s department of Material Science and Engineering have come up with an innovative solution. These engineers concern themselves daily with exploring the microstructure of materials in order to design and make new materials that could be able to have exceptional damage-resistance properties. The lead researcher, Gianluca Roscioli, an MIT graduate student, came up with his idea when he was shaving his own hair.

After noticing that his blades tend to get dull with time after shaving, he decided to take images of the blades after each shaving activity. He took these images with a scanning electron microscope (SEM), scanning the blade’s edge in order to track how the blade wore down over time. What he discovered showed that the process is much more complex than a simple wear over time. He noticed very little wear and rounding out at the edges but instead realized that chips were being formed around certain regions of the razor’s edge. These led him to ask himself: Under what conditions do these chipping take place, and what are the ingredients for a strengthened blade to fail after shaving a material as soft as human hair?

To answer these questions conclusively he built an apparatus that was designed to fit inside an SEM and he used it to take samples of his shaving and that of his colleagues. They found that there were some conditions that might cause the edges of a blade to chip and as the chipping proceeds with time, it will cause the blade to get dull. The conditions depend on the blade’s microstructure. If the blade is heterogeneous or the microscopic structure is not uniform, the blade will be more prone to chipping. Also, the angle at which the cutting was done was found to be significant. Therefore, they found that shaving at right angles were better than lower angles. Finally, the presence of defects in the steel’s microstructure was another factor that played a role in initiating cracks on the blade’s edge. Chipping was found to be more prominent when the human hair met the blade at a weak point in the blade’s heterogeneous structure.

These conditions illustrate a mechanism that is well known in engineering - stress intensification. This is the intensification of the stress applied to a material because the structure of the material has microcracks. Once an initial microcrack has formed, the material’s heterogeneous structure enabled these cracks to easily grow to become chips. Therefore, even though the material might be fifty times stronger than what it is cutting, the heterogeneity of the material can increase the stress on it, making cracks to intensify.

The implications of this discovery is immense. It will save money and costs to the average user of shaving blades because it will offer clues on how the edges of a blade can be preserved, and give manufacturers the opportunity to make better blades or cutting materials by using more homogenous materials.

The engineers have already taken their discovery one step further. They have filed a provisional patent on a process to manipulate steel into a more homogenous form, with the hope that they could use this process to build longer-lasting, and more chip-resistant blades.

Material for this post was taken from the MIT news website.