My name is Chris and I'm a 22 y/o danish student at The University of Copenhagen. As of summer 2024 I'm heading into the final year of my bachelor's degree. Current plans are to continue on with a master's degree in computer science immediately afterwards. I've always done decent at school, but it never really excited me before I enrolled at university. Being around like-minded people who all share a passion for the same subject massively boosted motivation, and made studying something to look forward to and get excited by for the first time.
For years now I've had the mindset that if I decide to do something, I'm not gonna do it half-heartedly. If I pick up a game, I crank it up to the hardest difficulty and retry for hours if I have to, until every mechanic is mastered and start looking for mods when the base difficulty is no longer challenging (do it well...). Similarly, I know I'm never catching up to people who have been playing first person shooters since they could walk, as such I never put any serious effort into practicing FPS games (...or not at all).
It's a difficult mindset to wrestle with when we start talking about programming. Moving out of our comfort zone to learn something new in the field (do it well...), we're bound to make bad software in the process, no matter how proficient we feel we are at other aspects of programming, we'll never be able to master everything (...or not at all?). However, I'd argue it's through that process of failing and iteration that we slowly add more and more skills to our repertoire that we know how to apply "well". The mastery of programming lies in accepting that we won't know everything, but still being confident that we can grasp the next concept with grace.