I Tried Surfing. Here's What Coding Didn't Prepare Me For.
The ocean doesn't care how many commits you have. Humbling, exhausting, and completely addictive.
I'm a backend engineer. My job is to make systems predictable. Define the inputs, expect the outputs, handle the edge cases.
The ocean does not care about any of that.
Day 1 at La Union
I rented a board, got a 20-minute lesson from an instructor who made it look effortless, and then proceeded to fall off approximately 47 times in 2 hours.
The part nobody tells you: it's not just balance. It's the pop-up — going from lying flat to standing in one explosive motion — and your brain and body have to agree on timing that you cannot intellectualize your way into.
In coding, if I don't understand something, I read the docs. I break it into smaller parts. I find an analogy.
Surfing has no docs. The wave doesn't wait for you to be ready.
What actually transferred
Frustration tolerance. When a deploy breaks at 2am and everything is on fire, you develop a certain calmness. That same flatness kicked in when I kept wiping out — okay, that didn't work, try again, no drama.
Pattern recognition too. By hour two I could feel (not think) which waves were worth trying. The data was in my body, not my head.
I'm going back
Already booked the next trip. Siargao in June — apparently the waves are more forgiving there in early summer. Probably a lie but I'll take it.
If you're a desk-bound engineer thinking about picking up something physical and humbling: do it. The contrast is the point.