There’s a scene in The Social Network in which a young Mark Zuckerberg explains to Eduardo Saverin the various rules associated with a late-night Harvard drinking/coding/hacking game.

“They have 10 minutes to get access to a Python root web server and expose its SSL encryption and then intercept all traffic over its secure port.”

“They’re hacking.”

“Yes,”

The scene is frenetic and charged with the energy of a late-night basement frat party. It’s grungy and raucous manages to make the little pocket of hacking culture seem almost sexy. I can’t really speak to the veracity of the depiction, but I can definitely identify with one thing about the scene. Headspace. As with all forms of art and creation—headspace is everything. We’re meant to take away from this scene that these computer engineering students are floating in a heady mix of hard liquor, high energy, and a sort of intimate comfortability with their artistic medium—in this case, command lines.

I’ve been watching snippets of The Social Network the past few nights as I’ve gotten deeper into Codecademy. From their introductory sampler of javascript basics I’ve learned quite a bit, but not all that much about coding. Codecademy’s first few lessons are almost insultingly simple—do this to get this result, etc.—and it lulled me into a false sense of thinking “hey, maybe this coding stuff isn’t so bad after all.” Breezing through the first few lessons and collecting the site’s cute, Foursquare-like badges of accomplishment made it easy to become sort of disengaged with the material, something that became clear around the third lesson.

As the learning curve of the material grew steeper, I found myself having to go back and process the small javascript lessons piecemeal as they’d been presented to me initially. Entering in commands in the dynamic workspace without really making the mental jump to conceptualizing java as a language had done absolutely nothing for me. Full disclosure, I sat for a good half hour trying my damnest to work my way through a lesson on modifying subscript values—cursing at my self computer for every error message I received. About 20 lines into the red “oops, try again” errors, I found myself drifting to YouTube in search of a distraction of my frustration. It was there that I happened upon The Social Network clip and found myself inspired.

The key, I would come to find, to getting into the rhythm of learning this stuff—and other things as wel, I suspect (I’ve won no awards for my studying habits)—is really getting one’s self psyched up, or putting themselves in the right headspace. Though I’m working with the smallest of small change with my entre into coding, seeing the fictionalized dorm-hackathon made me want to code, or at the very least feign it. That was enough to get through the subscript hurdles, to say the least. At most? It made one thing very clear. Immersion is by far the best supportive tool one can provide themselves with when learning a new skill. 

Also—javascript’s excellent for a few cheap laughs, as evidenced above.