Being a Programmer in 2026

At a tech fest last year I sat there coding something and understanding the problem at the same time, which is slower than it sounds like it should be. I'd write a bit, stop, go back and read what the problem was actually asking, realize I'd misread part of it, and start again. That was most of my day.

Around me, people were done. Not done in a "we worked hard and finished early" way. Done in a way where they'd read the problem out loud, hand the whole thing over to an AI, get something back, and move on to the next one. Some of them barely looked at what came out before pasting it in.

I don't want to write this as if I was above that, because I wasn't. I was jealous. That's the honest word for it. I was sitting there doing what I thought was the real version of the work, and the real version was losing. Badly. And the worst part wasn't even the speed. It was that from the outside, nobody could tell the difference. Their thing worked. My thing worked. Theirs took twenty minutes.

I wasn't in a good place mentally for a while after that. Not dramatic, just that low, flat feeling where you start quietly wondering if the thing you've been telling yourself is a strength is actually just you being slow and calling it something nicer.

That question stayed with me longer than the event did. Because it's a genuinely fair question. If two people produce the same working code, and one of them understood every line and one of them didn't, and nobody can tell which is which, then what exactly was the understanding for? What did I actually buy with those extra hours?

I couldn't answer it for a while. I'm not sure I fully can now. But something happened later that at least gave me part of an answer.

I built this portfolio. The site you're reading this on. Nothing about it is groundbreaking, it's a personal site with a blog attached. But I built the whole thing, including a blog pipeline that broke in a way I had never seen before and couldn't find a clean answer for anywhere. I sat with it for a long time. I read the error properly instead of skimming it. I worked out what was actually happening underneath, and then I fixed it, and the fix was mine.

When it finally worked I felt good in a way I hadn't in months. Not proud in a look at me way. More like relieved. Like something I'd been suspicious about turned out to be true after all.

Here's what I think that feeling actually was. At the tech fest, nothing I did was mine. It was correct, but it was borrowed in the sense that I could have gotten there another way and nobody would have known. With the portfolio bug, there was no other way. There was no version of that afternoon where I got past it without actually understanding it. The understanding wasn't a slower route to the same place. It was the only route.

That's the part I couldn't have explained before. Understanding doesn't pay off on the problems that have an answer somewhere. It pays off on the ones that don't. And at a tech fest, with a clean, well defined problem someone else wrote, almost everything has an answer somewhere. So of course I looked slow. I was paying a price for a thing that wasn't being tested that day.

I still think about those people sometimes and I've stopped assuming I know how it went for them. Maybe some of them understood everything they submitted perfectly well and were just faster than me. Probably some of them didn't. The honest answer is that you can't tell from outside, and that includes not being able to tell about yourself half the time.

What I've landed on is smaller and less satisfying than a lesson. I'm not going to pretend I've stopped comparing myself to people. I do it constantly. Someone posts a project and I feel that same flat feeling for a minute or two. What's changed is that I've got one real thing to hold against it now. I know what it feels like to be stuck on something with no shortcut available, and to sit there long enough to actually get it. That feeling is the only proof I have that the slow way is worth anything, and I only got it by being slow.

I don't know if that's enough. Some days it feels like a story I tell myself so I don't have to feel behind. But it happened, and I was there for it, and nobody handed it to me.

So if you were at that fest and you finished in twenty minutes, honestly, good. I mean that. But at some point you're going to hit the thing that doesn't have an answer waiting for it, and the only thing that gets you through is being willing to sit there and not know for a while. I hope you find out you can do that. I found out by accident, and it took an embarrassingly long afternoon.