Calculator
April 2020. COVID lockdown. Nowhere to go, nothing to do.
For most people it was a strange, anxious time. For me, it accidentally became the period where I started taking programming seriously. I was learning HTML and CSS, and had just started dipping my toes into JavaScript. I was consuming everything I could find - freeCodeCamp, YouTube tutorials, documentation, anything at my disposal.
At some point I decided I needed to build something. Not follow along with a tutorial. Actually build something myself.
So I picked a calculator.
From the outside, a calculator seems like the most boring, obvious beginner project you could possibly choose. Four operations. Some buttons. How hard could it be.
Turns out, pretty hard.
The moment you sit down to actually build one, things get complicated fast. How do you manage the display? How do you handle chaining multiple operators? What happens when someone hits equals twice? What about dividing by zero? What about backspace - do you clear the whole thing or just the last digit? Every question opened up three more questions.
JavaScript was still very new to me at the time. I was not confident with it at all. I spent a lot of time going back and forth between the code and the docs, trying to understand why something was not working the way I expected. There were moments where I genuinely did not know if I was going to be able to figure it out.
It took me about 3 to 4 days.
And when it finally worked -
I cannot even describe it properly. The feeling of pressing buttons on something I had built from scratch and watching it calculate correctly was one of the most rewarding moments I had experienced at that point. It sounds dramatic for a calculator. But if you have ever been in that place where you are learning something new and everything feels just slightly out of reach, and then suddenly it clicks - you know exactly what I mean.
This was not a complex project. Looking at the code today I can see a hundred things I would do differently. But this was the first project I had to genuinely lock in for. The first time I had to push through the confusion instead of giving up and going back to tutorials.
The lockdown gave me the time. The calculator gave me the reason to use it.
And that feeling of seeing it work for the first time? I have been chasing it ever since.
Ty for reading
