Learning is exhilarating. Not something I thought I would ever say because I never enjoyed learning for as long as I can remember. Until I was twenty-seven when I discovered programming. Prior to that, the only time I can imagine enjoying learning was doing Calculus questions when in school. Only two of the chapters were on Calculus, but I remember doing as many questions as I could find on it. The progression in the book was perfect—each question would use something from the previous and add to it. Other than that, I cannot remember a time where I sat down to study and spent more than thirty minutes on something before needing to "relax" for a bit. For that matter, even when I came across programming the first time in university, after the first couple of years I lost all interest in it. I thought I was not meant for learning stuff. So I decided to learn how to dive and became a dive instructor instead. Physical work I could sustain and even excelled at.
Yet when I was almost twenty-seven, I had a gnawing feeling that this was not what I was meant to do. After trying out a few other things like Marketing and Design, I decided to try programming again. So I started teaching myself. This time something was different—I found a community where quite a few people came to learn programming. We reviewed each other's code and had frequent calls with people who were actually working as programmers. The second time was the charm. As I started understanding things, I wanted to know more, and programming was all I thought about. It was when I met my first great teacher in programming. He was so generous with his time, would jump on calls and show me how he worked through problems. He would simply read the docs and follow what they said. Something that took a long time for me to implement myself. He was also the one who got me into Vim and Tmux, both of which I still use today. Simply because I was blown away by how effortlessly he moved around the screen and edited text. I still use both today; the only change is that I use Neovim btw.
Ever since then, I've had the opportunity to work with other great developers. Read their books or followed their series. Without them, it would have taken me a lot longer to learn even half the things I know today. It's also great to have discovered the joy of learning a little later in life. Now I'm addicted to it. It's a much better way of living than my life before. There are constant frustrations, but they lead to something good. Unlike the years I did not enjoy learning, where there were just frustrations. There are plenty of amazing teachers out there; thanks to the Internet, I can learn something from them too. Learning is fun.