That's kinda what did AND didn't work for me when it came to programming. I feel somewhat blessed to have been born in possibly the most interesting time since Gutenberg wrote “hallo, welt”.
I think there’s something quite specific about having learned the trade through that cusp, that changing of worlds - if you started with punch cards and ended with dumb terminals, your world changed only somewhat, and always had a utilitarian edge to it - we went through that Bildungsroman of growth and explosive expansion as a natural function of our environment.
You don’t need to poke under the hood, or learn the mechanics of CRTs, or compile a kernel and a zillion libraries to get them working - you just flip open your phone, or hit up the uri. I mean, as ridiculous as it may seem, the thing that got me into Linux was seeing a printout of a screenshot of Enlightenment 15 and just going “ what is that” - and for me, the idea that a GUI could be visually exciting was revelatory - I ended up wrapping my head around SuSE 4.2 on hardware it hated, getting E16 running (hey, it took me a while to figure out X, never mind anything else), and ended up learning C, C++ and Ruby because I wanted to make more of this unbelievably cool (in a very 90’s way) stuff. When I'm sitting in front of an empty text file, staring at the sea of infinite possibilities, all I feel is dread - the fear of how much effort I'm going to spend fighting tools to conceptualize my design, how much time I'm going to waste dealing with infrastructure, build systems, dependency management, constructing intermediary layers, writing and rewriting tests. The whole approach of writing code as plaintext document is not ergonomic enough. Programming languages are not expressive enough. I constantly feel bottlenecked by the speed of tooling we use - and not on the surface level (I have my Emacs configured well, thank you), but at a fundamental one. The problem is, refactoring involved in test-driven design discovery is even slower.
I'd like to do more TDD-ish approach, because the design process feels way too slow to me. I don't believe it works that way - I can explore the design space up front and pick good solutions faster than it would take me to organically arrive at them through applying orthodox TDD. I'm actually using a TDD-ish approach in my work, but I never felt comfortable letting it actually drive design decisions. It doesn't come across as facetious/condescending.
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