Plumbing

Plumbing • Harder than you think

Some of you who have gotten this far in the book may feel uncomfortable with how it is progressing. You may feel you’ve managed to follow instructions well enough, but don’t have a clear understanding of all of the underlying mechanisms going on behind the scenes.

If this is the case I want to reassure you that you are doing well. If you don’t understand the internals it’s because I may not have explained everything in sufficient depth. This is okay.

To be able to progress and get code to work under these conditions is a great skill in programming, and if you’ve made it this far it shows you have it.

In programming we call this plumbing. Roughly speaking this is following instructions to try to tie together a bunch of libraries or components, without fully understanding how they work internally.

It requires faith and intuition. Faith is required to believe that if the stars align, and every incantation is correctly performed for this magical machine, the right thing will really happen. And intuition is required to work out what has gone wrong, and how to fix things when they don’t go as planned.

Unfortunately these can’t be taught directly, so if you’ve made it this far then you’ve made it over a difficult hump, and in the following chapters I promise we’ll finish up with the plumbing, and actually start programming that feels fresh and wholesome.