Once about 10 to 15 years ago I was visiting my parents. I was sitting with my laptop in their lounge, typing code into a text editor. I can’t remember the details, but it was either for a pet project or I was fixing some code to do with my startup at the time. And my father walks in and asks “How do you know what to type?” I gave him some off the cuff answer like “I don’t know. When you talk, how do you know what to say?”. He wasn’t happy with the answer and walked off while I continued coding or debugging whatever it was I was working on.
I’ve been thinking about this at least once a month ever since.
To me this question comes back to bigger questions like how our brains even work. How do we learn? How do we think? When you learn to speak and later to read and write or to do maths, what really happens in your brain? How do our brains reason about things? How do we solve puzzles and other problems? How do we plan things?
All I know is that we probably don’t know, but whatever it is, it is the core skill of many technical careers.
I’ve described myself at times as a programmer, a developer or a software engineer. I think it is all different ways to say the same thing. And I think what it is we do is to figure things out, break it down, understand all the parts of it and approach how the whole thing works or how to split it all up into parts that can be tackled bit by bit and then eventually arrive at a complete system that hopefully solves the problem you set out to solve.
But if you think about it, this is also what all different kinds of engineers and related technical professions do. Consequently you’ll find that people in these professions tend to have lots of other technical hobbies and side projects. And that the best people in these professions could relatively easily reskill and move to one of the others. I’d go as far as to say that they could (given enough time and motivation) learn to do anything.
Or at least I like to think that I could learn to do anything. Or that I could have made a success in all sorts of careers if I made different choices or had different preferences when I left high school.
Does everyone have this innate ability? Is it genetic? Is it something you gained due to your upbringing? How does this “core skill” of not just learning but knowing how to learn (for lack of a better term) really work? And can it be taught? I have thought about this a lot and I still have no idea.
Clearly humans are born with some innate ability to learn. Whatever that means. I don’t think humans usually learn by rote learning. I think something much more low level happens in our brains. Connections at a deeply subconscious level are made that allows our brains to just arrive at the answers. Our conscious brains then like to post-rationalise how we got there. That’s my theory, anyway.
Years ago I read somewhere “You have to be interested in order to be interesting.” which can be interpreted at least two ways, but I’ve always taken it to mean that you have to be interested in the world and have interests so you would read up about and learn about those or otherwise chase and practise those interests and then you would be interesting because by the end you become an expert (or at least versed) in those things and then maybe once you can hold a conversation about it you’re more interesting as a result. Maybe this is how people learn?
Or maybe it is all about experience? I’ve seen it argued that people learn by doing. So once you’ve solved (or failed to solve after trying) many similar problems over the years, maybe you learn how to solve more of the same kinds of things more easily?
But none of this is helpful in answering “How do you know what to type?”
