This is the first time I’ve felt legitimately scared about coding. Yes, it’s somewhat linked to my anxiety over my (lack of) competency with the system, but there’s also something more distinct about it. It’s a little similar to what Noah explains on his blog, this feeling of “I’ve only just scratched the surface of this shit.” But, even more specifically, it’s also in discovering the capabilities of the system itself, this feeling that one wrong keystroke will send me code flying out of my control.

Let me elaborate. It started when we were talking about using certain words in var. How using the wrong keyword could somehow access something in the whole p5.js system and seriously mess with it. How it becomes almost impossible to fix. Maybe I’m being dramatic, but that moment marked a shift in the way I think about coding. I’m noodling with something that is not just limited to me, my blog, my floating bubbles, my ascending rockets. I’m working through a system that is far bigger than all of those things. And what’s scary is that I don’t even know exactly how I can mess it up; I just know that I can mess it up.

Looking at the “while loop” in class on Thursday tapped into this same fear. How if you don’t set up a falsy, your while loop will go on indefinitely and ultimately crash your browser. Hence why Kelly and Aden and I proceeded with extreme caution in figuring out the 500 balloon daily. We’re sitting there with the code in front of us, the while loop is de-activated, so to speak. It’s already configured so that the while loop won’t crash the system. Still, getting rid of those two backslashes, activating the code, pressing control save, etc., it felt like I was the president deciding whether or not to push the red button. Of course, the system didn’t crash (and even if it did, would it have been the worst thing in the world? It’s not even like it was my own computer), but the stakes felt incredibly high. The possibility of the system failing, after all, is much more frightening that the possibility of the system not doing anything at all.