Enlightment and Renaissance

You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards.

A while ago, I had an enlightening experience that has lingered in my mind for a long time, and I feel compelled to put it into words.

#The Lockdown That Taught Me to Think

I remember the exact moment the world stopped. It was March 2020, and I was sitting in my room, scrolling through the news, watching cities shut down one by one. No school. No going out. Nowhere to be, and suddenly, all the time in the world.

I didn't plan to learn how to code. It just sort of happened, the way most meaningful things do, out of boredom and a quiet desperation to feel useful.

#"Hello, Mehdi"

The first thing I ever wrote was a print statement. I typed my name into the terminal and hit enter, and the computer said it back to me.

That sounds like nothing. But it wasn't nothing. It was the first time I'd ever given a machine an instruction and watched it obey. I sat there for a second, just staring at those two words on the black screen. I typed it again. It said it again. I typed it ten more times just to make sure it wasn't a coincidence.

It wasn't. The computer does exactly what you tell it to. Every single time. No mood, no resistance, no fatigue. That reliability felt almost revolutionary in a world that had just become completely unpredictable.

#The Loop That Broke My Brain (In a Good Way)

A few days in, I learned about loops.

I wrote something like:

for i in range(1000):
    print("Mehdi")

And in under a second, my name filled the entire screen, a thousand times. I hadn't typed it a thousand times. I'd typed it once, and described a pattern, and the machine executed that pattern without hesitation or complaint.

That was the moment something clicked. Not just about code, but about computers in general. This is what they are. Not magic. Not intelligence. Just the relentless, tireless execution of instructions at a scale no human could match. The power isn't in the machine. It's in the pattern. It's in the loop.

I spent the rest of that week writing loops for everything. Print my name. Count to a million. Repeat a joke until it stops being funny. It never stops being funny when a computer does it.

#From Printing Names to Solving Problems

The novelty of controlling a machine wore off after a while, and that's when the real learning started.

I started noticing things around me that were inefficient. Annoying. Broken. Things that took too long or didn't exist at all. And I started asking a new question: could I build something for that?

At first the answer was almost always no. My skills were nowhere near what I needed. But the question itself changed how I saw the world. Every frustration became a potential project. Every gap became an opportunity. I wasn't just a person stuck at home anymore, I was a person with a tool that could, in theory, build anything.

That feeling is hard to describe. It's somewhere between confidence and obsession.

#Building Things That Matter

The further I got, the more I understood that code is only interesting when it's in service of something real. A loop that prints my name is a toy. A loop that processes thousands of records, or generates music, or renders a UI, that's a tool.

I started building small things. Then less small things. Each project taught me something the tutorials never could: that real problems are messy, that requirements change, that the gap between "it works on my machine" and "it works" is enormous and humbling.

But every time something I built solved a real problem, for me, or for someone else, it felt like nothing else. Not the dopamine of a like or a notification. Something quieter and more lasting. The satisfaction of having made something that didn't exist before.

#What COVID Actually Gave Me

I won't romanticize the pandemic. It was hard, and lonely, and frightening in ways I'm still processing. But in the middle of all that stillness, I found something I didn't know I was looking for.

I found a way to think. A way to break hard things into small things, and small things into steps, and steps into code. I found that computers are not intimidating once you understand they are just very fast, very obedient, very literal machines, and that the interesting part is always the human on the other side deciding what to ask them to do.

The world was out of my control. But the terminal always listened. And slowly, one loop at a time, I learned to build my way out of the noise.

So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something, your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.

Steve Jobs