Building Cathedrals — In Coding, And In Life

To embrace growth is to guarantee adversity. To embrace adversity is to guarantee growth. Despite the mental exhaustion, severe headaches, and countless horrible disappointments that the month of June gave me, I would go through it all over again. Here’s why.

Sometime near mid-June, I decided to get back to making Android apps. I’d taken an awfully long break from coding, and I was itching to get back to stressing myself out over bugs and make my life shit but fulfilling again. So I started working on a project called Remember, an app which schedules revision based on the Leitner system. Like every other app I’d made, this one, too, was primarily for myself. I planned the project well, and was set to finish it within thirty hours.

And I did. I’m kidding, I just wanted to feel really proud of myself for a moment. Doy, I didn’t finish the app in thirty hours.

The project ended up consuming most of my mind and time for a whole week — and after fifty hours of banging my work desk, swearing at my phone, and dreaming of a million bugs eating me alive while napping, I had an app to show for it. Yes, my return to coding was a terrible experience. Yes, it made me pull out one hair too many. And yes, I fucking loved it. Out of the so many other reasons behind those statements, here’s one: no combination of books/college/online courses/YouTube videos/Medium articles could have taught me in fifty hours what this project so elegantly and effectively did in that same amount of time.

It taught me that delivering a good product at the expense of exceeding the deadline is always, always, always better than shoving a half-baked product down my beta testers’ throats. It taught me that settling for sub-optimal standards, especially in case of UI/UX is dangerously short-sighted and foolish, and very harmful in the long run.

But most importantly, this project taught me the importance of zooming in and out, in coding and in life — and I say without exaggerating that it is a lesson I will carry to my deathbed.

Hunched over with an aching neck, staring fiercely at my laptop, unable to figure out why my app was failing to communicate with the cloud, I wasn’t in a particularly joyous mood. The fact that my stomach was revolting with hunger wasn’t helping either. But what could I do? I’d finished all the definitely-not-healthy snacks at my disposal (which, when coding, translates to “within the reach of my left arm”) And you best believe I wasn’t going to actually take the pains of getting up and grabbing an apple — not until my app was able to communicate with the damn cloud.

Add to that my pet dog constantly trying to coax me into taking a walk*, and you get a very frustrated Kunal, and that’s before you bring my painfully slow internet into the equation.

*This isn't to say that I hate walking my dog in general, it's just that I was stressed out and didn't need that kind of positivity and cuteness in my life at that time -- I needed to get my damn app to talk to the damn cloud.

In a spontaneous and somewhat stochastic manner, I shut down my laptop. I just couldn’t take it all in. I’d been working all day, and I was mentally exhausted. While petting my dog, I noticed how the edges of my laptop had etched a deep line on my right wrist. It was almost like my laptop had branded a slave. It was funny because it was true. I smirked at the thought, loosening up a little bit — and one deep, relaxing breath later, one of the most beautiful poems I’ve ever read came to mind:

Now we will count to twelveand we will all keep still.

For once on the face of the earth,let’s not speak in any language;let’s stop for one second,and not move our arms so much.

It would be an exotic momentwithout rush, without engines;we would all be togetherin a sudden strangeness.

Fisherman in the cold seawould not harm whalesand the man gathering saltwould look at his hurt hands.

Those who prepare green wars,wars with gas, wars with fire,victories with no survivors,would put on clean clothesand walk about with their brothersin the shade, doing nothing.

~Excerpt from “Keeping Quiet” by Pablo Neruda

Sound relatable? It did to me.

The world is only getting noisier, more competitive. It is becoming increasingly difficult to take a moment to just sit and think. This is a crime we are all, at some level, guilty of. Rarely do we stop gathering salt to look at our bleeding hands. Rarely do we stop slaving away at big flashy corporate offices, doing jobs we hate, to think about why we’re really there.

Rarely do we stop trying to get the app to talk to the damn cloud, and just take a walk with our dog.

We’re spending too much time on the ground floor, the dirt, the hustle, whatever you want to call it. Not nearly often do we step back to look at the bigger picture. I remember trying to sketch a portrait of one of my favorite artists once. The nose part was really challenging, so I rolled up my sleeves and took hours to make the prettiest nose I’d ever sketched. I was so damn pleased with that nose. That pleasure dissolved into thin air, however, when I realized that I’d actually made it too big in proportion to the face.

This ugly portrait was the perfect metaphor for my mindset, because that is exactly how getting buried alive under minutiae feels — ugly. Ugly, and wasteful.

Walking down the street with my dog, I kept thinking about this realization until it was branded onto my brain. A huge value I’d conferred upon it, a valuation I still stand by. I constantly reminded myself of what basic problem my app was supposed to solve — why I had started making it in the first place. It just wouldn’t do to get engrossed in the color of the buttons and forget why I started making the app in the first place — to schedule revisions in a way that maximizes retention. It was a shame that I was spending more time thinking about the leaves when I wasn’t even done with the trunk.

More meditation helped me discover that this tendency to drown into relatively trivial details wasn’t just a coding thing. It plagued most of my thought processes and working strategies — be it in writing, preparing for exams, reading books, or making major life decisions. The evil of excessive nearsightedness and inept farsightedness was, it seemed, all-pervasive.

Thankfully, though, I knew intuitively what to do — and so do most people, I believe. We’re all equipped with the tools to fight this evil, to zoom out when necessary and zoom in when it really counts. We just don’t use them, because we’re so lost in sketching the nose that we forget that it’s a part of something bigger. The solution? Simple, but not easy. Frequently taking a moment to step back. To meditate on our objectives. To see how the entire portrait is coming along. To continuously evaluate the gestalt while still having an eye for detail. Paraphrasing Artistotle, we need to find the golden mean between the extremes of complete nearsightedness and total farsightedness.

Now I can’t say I’ve totally nailed the golden mean. I wish I could, but I certainly haven’t. Every now and then I still get all wound up about why so and so button looks so small or why a perfectly functional feature just stops working out of the blue — or get too caught up with the long-term strategy to actually take action — but I’m taking baby steps, improving myself slowly and carefully. That’s what counts when you’re a teenager like me, after all.

Hell, that’s what counts at any point in the human condition.

Credits

One day, a traveler, walking along a lne, came across three stone-cutters working in a quarry. Each was busy cutting a block of stone. Interested to find out what they were working on, he asked the first stone-cutter what he was doing. “Can’t you see? I am cutting a stone!”

Still no wiser the traveler turned to the second stone-cutter and asked him what he was doing. “I am cutting this block of stone to make sure that its square, and its dimensions are uniform, so that it will fit exactly in its place in a wall.”

A bit closer to finding out what the stone-cutters were working on but still unclear, the traveler turned to the third stone-cutter. He seemed to be the happiest of the three and when asked what he was doing replied:

“I am building a cathedral.”

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Building Cathedrals — In Coding, And In Life was originally published in Hacker Noon on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.