Lei Zhang

There’s a peculiar moment that happens when you’ve been staring at code for too long. The syntax starts to blur, the logic becomes fog, and you begin to question whether you’re solving a problem or creating ten more.

I had one of those moments last Tuesday at 3 AM.

The bug was simple in theory—a race condition in an asynchronous callback. The kind of thing that shouldn’t take more than an hour to fix. But six hours later, there I was, questioning my entire understanding of event loops and wondering if I should have just become a baker instead.

“Maybe code isn’t meant to be understood,” I thought. “Maybe it’s meant to be felt.”

That’s when it hit me. Code is a lot like jazz. There’s structure, sure—syntax rules, design patterns, best practices. But somewhere in between the semicolons and the curly braces, there’s improvisation. There’s that moment when you write something that technically shouldn’t work, but somehow does. When you refactor something three times and end up back where you started, except now it makes sense.

Or maybe I was just sleep-deprived.

I’ve been coding for years now, and I still don’t know if I’m any good at it. Some days I write elegant solutions that make me feel like a genius. Other days I spend two hours debugging only to realize I misspelled a variable name. The ratio of genius days to typo days is embarrassingly skewed.

But here’s the thing—I keep coming back. Not because I’m chasing perfection or trying to prove something. I come back because there’s something deeply satisfying about taking an abstract problem and turning it into something concrete. Something that runs. Something that works.

Even when it doesn’t work, there’s value in the attempt.

I fixed that bug eventually. Turned out the solution was simpler than I thought—isn’t it always? A single line change. A Promise wrapper. Done.

Sitting there in the early morning light, I realized that the six hours weren’t wasted. They were spent understanding. Wrestling with complexity. Building intuition for the next time.

Code isn’t just about making machines do things. It’s about making yourself think differently. It’s about training your brain to see patterns, to break down problems, to be comfortable with uncertainty.

It’s about becoming okay with not knowing, and then figuring it out anyway.

So yeah, I could have been a baker. But then I wouldn’t get these weird 3 AM philosophical moments about semicolons and race conditions. And honestly? I wouldn’t trade that for anything.

Not even fresh croissants.

Well, maybe for fresh croissants.