[People nowadays believe that] work that needed to be done day after day was meaningless, and that only creating new things was a worthwhile endeavor.
Debbie Chachra, “Why I Am Not a Maker,” The Atlantic, January 23, 2015.
Another Ctrl + Enter. It was the hundredth time I ran the same code snippet. And it was after mid-night. I just could not find the errors that made my code fail.
Last summer, I joined a game-science lab in Boston as a research assistant. As I requested, I was assigned the task of training machine-learning models to generate game levels. Previously, I had been self-studying machine-learning libraries by reading. At that time, I thought that the task would be easy; since I understood everything explained in books, I should be a good practitioner.
It turned out that I was wrong.
Coding requires trials and errors. This is unavoidable. If I want to continue to code, I need find meaning not only in the end products (a running program) but also in this very process of coding: thinking through how to modularize functions into classes, researching ways to import datasets faster and etc.
As implied in the quote, the conventional wisdom differentiates and values work by its end products. But what if nothing worthwhile is obtained after a creative exploration? Is the work meaningless then? I don’t think so. The importance of goals should not be underestimated, but the accomplishments of goals only take up a very small proportion of our lives; we spent most of our time in the process of reaching goals. Therefore, in order to make life enjoyable, I learnt to enjoy those laborious things in the process.
I did not have a clear learning goal coming into this class. At this moment, I would like to continue to deepen my understanding of “a project”. With CS perspective, I am quite surprised that this concept is never discussed or formalized in the field of CS. Because of this, the How Did They Make That video completely blew my mind by its organized approach towards building projects.
