Day two of "Coding With" for the South Florida Entrepreneur Club's 10 for 10 challenge is officially complete and deployed. I'm feeling really excited that I managed to get through building my second program. It’s definitely a good sign for things to come over the next few days. So with that said, today’s programming theme was “Coding with Joy”.
In my experience, coding has always felt somewhat the same. When I sit down at my computer I typically feel very focused and serious. I’d never really experienced programming with any other sort of emotion, or any other positive emotion I should say. So when I planned out all of my programming themes for each day, I was kind of skeptical about whether or not I would be able to channel the motif properly or if it would be something I had to force.
Today I was pleasantly surprised when I had the best time building my pet note generator. Like so many others with beloved creatures at home, my puppies are my whole world. This program would present the user with a form to enter their pets information, an image, and some sweet notes about them. On form submit, the details would be presented to the user as a card to their furry friend. Yes, I’m aware my dogs cannot read the digital cards I create for them, but that’s a minor detail and far from something that would stop me from designing them anyway.
To make the program a joyful experience to code and use I implemented all of the cheesiest CSS that I would never otherwise be able to put in a project for work. Crazy backgrounds with watermarks, silly mixed borders, ridiculous, large fonts, everything was fair game. It felt so good not worrying about how things looked and if the design was even remotely passable. The worse it turned out the more enjoyable it was to build.
At any point that I started to write something that was taking too long to make work or ended up being more challenging than I planned, I immediately ditched it and moved on. This was not only a decision based on the limited number of hours I have in a day to work on this, but also because the entire point of the project was to feel joy. As soon as I felt myself straying from the enthusiasm of writing love notes to my babies I changed course.
The intention of these programs is to feel something while coding, not to create viable projects -- I already do the latter everyday. Sure, I could make fields required with validation, add titles, and clean up the layout, but I’ll save that energy for my day job.
Every time I threw in some wild code that made my program sillier I would just start laughing thinking about how ridiculous this was, and all the friends and family who I knew would love it. I sent my sister the program as soon as it was deployed and immediately got back a screenshot of a letter to her corgi. I couldn’t ask for a better finish to this project than laughing with her over these silly notes.
So with that, I think I achieved what I set out to accomplish, and I'm very happy with the finished project. :)
Loved this one! Scully enjoyed her letter, I read it to her! Happy National Puppy Day :)