If you want to play an electric guitar, you have to be plugged in. Without the pickups, nothing will happen. You can strum as hard as you like, but there’s no signal until the sound gets picked up. In other words, you can’t play guitar without pickups.
Similarly, you can’t code in isolation. When I’m not writing code myself, I spend a lot of time reading and thinking about other people’s code. With some programming languages or frameworks, it is possible to pull off a one-person project that works perfectly well on its own; I’ve done it myself a few times. But even in those cases, there are always pieces of external code that make everything possible.
The key with both guitars and coding is to find the right pickup: whether it’s the one that comes on your guitar or a hot-rodded replacement. Sometimes it’s obvious what pickup you need; sometimes it takes a bit more experimentation and research. And if you want more output at this point, here are two suggestions:
– Read up on the pickups used by your favorite guitarists (and coders). What makes them special? Are they still making them
When I was in high school, I wanted to be a rock star. So I got my first guitar, but it didn’t have any pickups, and it sat on the shelf for a few years.
I never had time for lessons or practice, so eventually I sold it. A year later, my friend gave me another guitar and amps and pedals. This time I had a garage band, but the songs were too complicated for me to learn.
A few years later, a different friend gave me a better guitar and amps and pedals. This time we practiced every day after school, but none of us knew how to play very well.
Eventually I took lessons from a professional musician. The teacher told me that if I really wanted to learn to play the guitar, he could teach me everything he knew in three months (for $3K). So I thought about it and decided not to.
I’ve been playing guitar ever since.
Then one day last year, I read that you can’t play electric guitar without pickups. It turns out there are two types: single coil pickups (which give you more of a “clean” tone) or humbucker pickups (which give you more of a “dirty
I’ve been playing guitar for a few years, and I’m a big fan of electric guitars. The sound is just so different and fantastic, thanks to the pickups. Without pickups, you can’t play the electric guitar.
In this post, I want to show you why coding is like playing the electric guitar.
Let’s start with the pickups. The pickups on an electric guitar are what give it its distinctive sound. They take the vibrations of the strings and translate them into an electrical signal that goes through a cable to an amplifier. In other words, without the pickups, there is no sound… only silence.
The first thing you need to know if you are going to play guitar is how to pick strings. You can play the guitar without knowing how to use a pickup, but it takes much longer and is less efficient.
Programmers have their own equivalent of pickups: they call them frameworks. A framework is software that is designed to be reused by other programmers, as opposed to being designed for end users. The main advantage of frameworks is that they allow you to reuse code without having to reinvent the wheel every time you program something new.
Frameworks are the dominant paradigm in web programming today, and there are a lot of different ones, each with its own advantages and disadvantages. Some popular examples include Django, Ruby on Rails, and Flask. I didn’t learn about frameworks until I started programming professionally, but as soon as I did I knew that I would be writing lots of code using one or more of them. So I decided to try writing some personal projects using them too. My thinking was that it would be good experience no matter what kind of job I ended up getting after graduation.
I wrote a few small projects in Django, which turned out pretty well (except for the fact that it was way overkill for what I was doing). But when it came time to
If you want to play a guitar, you need a pickup. You can’t strum the thing without one. And while many pickups are passive, most of the instruments used in modern-day recordings employ active pickups because they produce a hotter, fuller sound.
Similarly, if you want to program, you need a coding language that has been picked up by others. You can’t code without one. While many languages have been picked up passively by users and implemented as stand-alone programs on their own systems (Fortran, Basic), most of the programming languages used today are active, because they are designed to be plugged into other programs (C/C++ or Java).
I had long ago found out that there was a world of difference between playing an electric guitar and unplugged. I always thought the lack of sound was because I was no good. Then my father brought home a book about electronics and showed me that it was the pickups that make the sound come out.
I remember being so excited to play the guitar now that I knew what was wrong with it. I started playing right away and couldn’t stop for days. I was amazed at how loud, clear and full the sound came out. It was like having a small orchestra in your bedroom. From then on I always played plugged in.
What does this story have to do with coding? Ask any programmer what’s the hardest part about coding and he will tell you it’s debugging (finding an error).
But the technology that allows us to share our work with a worldwide audience has changed all of that. The Internet allows people to connect and consume content like never before, and although it’s not easy to get noticed in an ocean of information, it is possible.
The first step is to create something worth noticing. By writing a book or creating a course or an online class, you can share what you know with people who want to learn from you. Your words and ideas will be out there in the world for anyone who wants to find them. Then, once you have something available for sale, you can use the Internet to promote it and make money from it. It’s a model that has worked for thousands of people just like you, including me.
But getting started is often the biggest challenge. Writing something that other people will pay for doesn’t happen overnight, and you might be tempted to put off starting at all because you don’t think you have the time or resources necessary to do it right now.
But if you can make time for something important enough—like learning how to play guitar—then maybe it’s time we made time for learning how to code as well.