Building Resilience in Coding

Caroline McWilliams
Monday 23 January 2023

By Anonymous

Failure happens almost every day in coding, and it is inevitable. Computer Science students in fourth and second year reflect on their experience with building resilience in coding. Your code will fail a number of times before you get it right. Sometimes it happens more, sometimes it happens less. It is important to realise that if you make a mistake, the least practical thing to do is to shy away from it. Obviously, failures are frustrating, especially because you almost never know immediately what went wrong.

Failures in the early stages of coding are beneficial for the learning process. “Failing always pushes me to actively look for my mistakes, and then to learn how to fix them” comments a second-year student of Computer Science.

Looking back on their experience with coding, fourth-year students stress that there is rarely anyone to blame for the failures in coding: “During group projects, when we merge codes, weird things out of our control happen. Computer Science teaches you that at times you can’t put your failure aside and distract yourself from it. You are forced into building a resilient attitude, because you have to fix the mistake immediately no matter how long it might take you to actually find it”.

Multiple failures in coding helped strengthen confidence and develop in-depth knowledge. “We now make a lot less mistakes because we know better what we are doing”, explain fourth-year students, “and when we do make mistakes, we know where to look for them”.

Experiencing failure in coding may have shaped how we deal with failures in life, but there is no specific way to describe it”, add the students in conclusion,” we learnt to accept that failures do happen, and the best thing you can do in that case is to go straight to the problem and fix it”.

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