There are three reasons I would have made a lousy programmer...I wrote about one of them yesterday...the second one is that I get uneasy when I make mistakes (how that came to be is a whole other story I'll probably write about some day)...and unless you are a person who is always focused, vigilant, even brilliant, you cannot program without making them...and I'm not talking about typos, which have been largely overcome by great development tools that validate code as it's written...no, I'm talking about the kind of mistakes that keep things from working as designed...I learned long ago that getting that right all of the time requires more attention to detail than I can consistently and joyfully muster...
Take yesterday for example...suddenly, Facebook began posting the wrong photo with my blog updates...the updates are posted automatically and had been working earlier in the day, so I found this behavior quite puzzling...and since it wasn't my code doing the posting, I initially thought it would be somebody else's problem to correct...are you laughing yet?
I turned first to Squarespace, my web hosting company, which immediately confirmed they were sending the correct image to Facebook...perhaps, the support person wrote back, I needed to use Facebook's debugging tool to identify and fix the problem...
All I can say is: this is a rabbit hole I hope not to fall into again...at first glance, the debugger looked simple enough...it came with a one-line instruction and required completing only one entry...yes, it sure looked simple...until the first attempt returned an error...and then many attempts returned errors...
This is when I got irritated, anxious, hopeful, frustrated, sad, mad, distraught, prayerful...all in the course of a single hour...I used an experience that would likely have been really fun for a "real" developer and made it the source of my increasing agony (not that I do this any other time in life)...
This outcome highlights the most important reason I would not make it as a programmer: temperament...I'm lacking the required emotional intelligence...sure, I'm able to produce many an emotion...in fact, I can do that mostly on cue...and what I'd prefer to do in the future is create only the good feeling ones...and create them deliberately in relationship to whatever situation is at hand...
My mistake? I could have had a really great learning experience and appreciated my tenacity. The coding mistake? It was Facebook's. Now that I've fixed it, I can avoid making it again. Gosh, what if it's that simple in life?...