I’ve been doing what I now consider truly coding for the last 4 years, but I’ve been doing much simpler programming for 10 years.
Something happened more over the last 2 years, as I used other’s peoples libraries and found bugs or thought of ways of improving them, I stopped being afraid or intimidated by other’s people’s open source code and I started reading it, and understanding, and I started critizing, and then fixing, and in most cases now, this is so familiar that I open several projects of other teams and I can now read them as If I had wrote them.
The code, which is meant to tell the computer of an algorithm, all of a sudden becomes a language of intellectual expression on which programmers can talk to each other in these concepts that we somehow try to describe with words, but they’re so much more that language cannot hold. Programmers can try to describe to each other ideas on how to build these systems, but there comes a point where they read each other’s minds and nod, and they start speaking through their code.
Coding has this awesome instant gratification that occurs when you run the code and it works like expected, it’s a really awesome validation of the correctness of your mental model to be able to see the thing working and to experience that along with other people who are thinking about these systems just like you feels great, it’s like speaking another higher level language.
I think the same thing occurs with anybody that is good at whatever they do, they must first get to a certain level of sofistication to be good at it. Comedians eventually master the timing of the joke delivery, and they can perform combos to make you laugh exactly when they want you to laugh. Great comedians disassemble other comedians shows probably even to a mathematical level, just to learn or read what is it that whoever wrote this was trying to do with the public’s
The same with musicians, they speak with more than words when they speak to each other through the music. To be able to communicate with other people like this I think that’s some sort of mind reading