duttakapil's comments

Would love to get involved!

May I ask, what is your personal journey of learning to code? Did you also discover Lisp/Scheme through SICP? And what have you professionally used Scheme for?

I am currently going through SICP, and I am also interested in Rust, so this project is a great discovery! Maybe I can contribute to it also.

I have been thinking to do exactly this lately. Just keep switching between projects when I hit the walls, keep the momentum going somehow

This is a very insightful comment actually. I think you are right in many ways. My brain is wired to constantly try going fast. Everything I am able to do, is mostly from short bursts of dopamine rush. If that rush slows down or stops, such as when dealing with frustration of not being able to make something work immediately, my brain starts to shut down - and then it's like trying to swim across dry land. Curiosity and desire for problem solving helps sometimes, when I am in the right headspace, but other times it's simply absent. The work starts feeling dreadful. Need to figure out some ways around this.

Context for HN :

It's 2 am here right now. I wrote this post very quickly in about 30 mins on the recommendation of a friend to just take my mind off things before going to sleep. I was not expecting it to get any real attention, and so did not attempt to provide much context in the post.

Genuinely appreciate your comments, especially those with encouraging, emphatic words and guidance. Also great to read your own personal journeys as well.

Although I started learning to code 10 years ago, I have not actually been actively coding for all these years. I have worked as a full time dev professionally for maybe just 3 months, and quickly moved into management roles from there.

My primary expertise today is more towards product management, sales, marketing, etc than coding. I currently work in a Enterprise Sales role, and my goal is still being an entrepreneur and building companies.

Zooming out and looking at my entire history, I have spent very little actual time coding. This is the primary reason behind the struggle I express in this post. I feel frustrated with how much little time I have put into it over the years, and how little progress I have made.

Also, perhaps important to note, I have diagnosed ADHD, chronic anxiety disorder and some level of bipolar as well. I don't like to attach these as part of my personality, but it explains a lot of my impulsivity, grandiose thinking and mood swings, which contribute to my frustration significantly as well. Also the reason why I could never learn well in classroom or with tutors. Self-learning has always worked better for me.

The post is intentionally very generic and vague, and doesn't give any specific examples of what I was struggling with and why, simply because it was more of an emotional post to express my frustration from the past week. I also have not written anything in a long time, so this was a good excuse for me to quickly write and publish something.

I recently started working on a new side project, and I have a team of people working with me, but we have been falling short of hands, and so I decided to get more involved in the development, and things were going great until last week when I started trying to refactor our codebase. I hit many walls with things I did not fully deeply understand, and struggling to keep track of a lot of different changes as I was making them - thus ending up breaking things and compounding my frustration even more.

I am currently strongly motivated to get better at coding. That is what prompted me to talk to my friend, who is the best engineer I know, and who encouraged me to write down my thoughts and publish them.

I am certain that with persistence and consistency, I would get through and not struggle as much as I have in the past week.

Have been feeling very frustrated this past week working on something. Started wondering if I am dumb or is this actually hard. Decided to write a simple quick blog post on it -

I was learning Next.js long ago and got started with this tutorial : https://nextjs.org/learn/basics/create-nextjs-app. And then updated it as I needed

Yes, and it seems to be that brains with higher intelligence have stronger tendencies to "overthink" and thus triggering anxiety, irrational discomfort, etc. Everyone experiences this in general, but with higher intelligence the likelihood dials up. See this paper - https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S016028961... for reference

Yes. Accepting what you can and cannot control is essential. Worrying about things beyond your influence can be futile. Even within yourself, you might not be able to control your mind or even your life in it's entirety, but you can control what you pay attention to this second. Simply paying attention to the present, mindfulness practice, helps modulate your experience of life without actively trying to control it

Very interesting point of view! Stephen Hawking was the first mentor in my life. He was a great source of inspiration for me, and I spent a lot of time trying to understand what his life must have been like, with his body failing, and yet still motivating himself to do such brilliant work.

The last bit about spreading your focus to your entire body is more about detaching yourself from the continuous on-going rumination of the mind, to pay closer attention to what's real right in front of you right now as a unbiased unfiltered consciousness, rather than whatever your mind is occupied with. My experience is that this is the single thing which when practiced enough times can immediately pull you out of your misery, especially if your misery is self-inflected.

The esoteric term for this practice is mindfulness. I personally exercise my own style of mindfulness, which is partly inspired by Stephen Hawking as well. I visualize my present moment the same way Hawking would describe the mechanics of the Universe in his books and shows. I would go to the microscopic level, zoom in, zoom out, follow the flow of energy, matter, cause, effect, I would imagine a quick timeline of the objects in front of me, where they came from, how they came into existence, I would see how everything is connected with each other, rather than being separate individual entities. I would pay attention to myself, all my senses, my perceptions, emotions, reactions, almost from a 3rd person pov. Like a Scientist observing a Monkey, and all my agitation and worries just disappear.

All of this helps me realign myself. It grounds me in a way that nothing else does. I find it quiet relaxing honestly

Me too! :D

Hello, author here.

I think I failed to communicate the core idea of the article here. Of course what I describe is a product of the human condition, my argument was simply that "intelligence" dials up that conditioning, resulting in the person being more prone to such suffering.

Everyone thinks, everyone questions, it's just that the intelligence tends to make you think and question a lot more, resulting more often in the separation of mind and body. There are many research studies on this subject as well, I mentioned one of them in the article : https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S016028961....

The other part of the article was focused more on our higher expectation from such people around us, setting them up for greater disappointment. And the limitations of intelligence, how cognitive biases can creep in even if you are a highly rational person.

Also thank you for expressing your concern and kind words, I am not actually dealing with an existential crisis at the moment, although I have in the past :)

Yes, I'm 19. And?

Based on the amount of feedback that I've received with an ageist attitude, I'm starting to wonder if it is even possible for people to criticize the piece without mentioning my age in a condescending tone.

My age has nothing to do with how this article reads. Maybe lack of experience in writing professionally, but not my age. I suggest you give the article another read, but this time try ignoring that innocent two digit number I publicly declared without any second thoughts (which I've deleted now, because I want genuine feedback).

And I'm not going to defend that generalized statement of mine. I don't agree with it fully myself anymore. There's no objective way of concluding which generation is/was the most arrogant and self-obsessed. My current stance is that, for every generation, the youth is always the most arrogant and self-obsessed, and the arrogance goes down as you grow older.

Thanks for the response though :)