If at first you don’t succeed…try, try, try, try, try, try again!

The land of software development has some dark corners.

We’re talking about the things we must all do from time to time to be a PRO CODER. It may be fun and glorious to build that Hello World app with our latest 5-minute tutorial leveraging some cool toolkit. But to think THIS will be the thesis of your day-to-day job as a professional is false.

I don’t know if you went to college or a 12-week bootcamp. I don’t know if you’re just reading this and THINKING about side hustling your way into the world of software development. (Kudos if you are!)

But I don’t want there to be ANY confusion that on some days, many days in fact, you have to simply, calmly, peacefully…

BRUTE FORCE your way through a PROBLEM!

On certain days/weeks, you must:

1. Try something.
2. See if it worked.
3. If not, circle to step 1.
4. Rinse and repeat.

And you must DO THIS 100x today. 100x tomorrow. 100x every day this week.

100x100x100 times…until something moves the way you want it to move.

This is what has SO MANY people stoked for automated testing. This is why JUnit and Spock testing toolkit and Groovy testing and Testcontainers and so many other wickedly awesome testing toolkits draw such huge fanbases.

The easier it is to capture a scenario or behavior in a repeatable piece of code that exercises your code, the easier it is to break out of that crazy loop I just listed up above.

Because as grand and glorious as Software Development is, and as much as we celebrate it as a discipline of ENGINEERING, many times (too many times?), not everything is solved with pen & paper.

Some problems are simply solved by trial and error.

Trial and error.

Random onlooker: “Yeah? So what! Lots of jobs require trial and error.”

Indeed, Grasshopper, this is true. But to be a successful developer on your team, there are some days where no one has the answer for YOU. There will be some days where Stackoverflow.com won’t have the answer for YOU…