It is 3:42 p.m. I am sitting in that odd sunny spot by the library window where the sunshine can feel warm and cozy or bright and glaring, depending on how you are seated. Half the students around me are nodding off at their laptop keyboards. The other half are pretending to study but are just staring at memes. I am in the middle, with my screen full of curly braces and error messages, which have begun to feel a bit personal by now.

I have been looking at the same code for, I can’t remember how long. long enough that my coffee is cold, and my eyes are starting to feel dry, and I have gone from “I got this” to “I will just wait it out and it will fix itself.” Spoiler: it has not.

That is basically how I ended up looking for programming help three times this week.

The Special Kind of Tired

There’s tiredness, and there’s programming tiredness. It’s the kind of tiredness where you:

• Fix one bug, and three other bugs pop up.
• Run your code, it “works,” but deep down, you know it is just slapped together with tape and the normal amount of hope.
• You take something from StackOverflow, and then you spend an hour convincing yourself that you really understand it.
• You blink and it’s already nighttime.

Programming always has a way of making you feel like a genius and a total fraud, all within 10 minutes. When a few of your deadlines start stacking up, that mental whiplash can start to be “intense.”

I Just Cannot figure it out.

I maintained an unspoken rule: only ask for help in truly life-or-death cases. I would say to myself, “You are intelligent, you can fix this,” kind of like a motivational soundtrack. And yes, there have been times when I was able to figure it out. But more often than not, I was not.

Last semester, I spent two nights trying to fix a single function that had a missing semicolon. A pair of nights. For a semicolon.

This semester, I thought maybe, just maybe, it doesn’t break the rules to look for a Programming Assignment Helper, or even look for some programming help in Singapore (because at least those people understand the time zone). I am not trying to offload my entire degree, but sometimes you just need a nudge in the right direction, or help from someone who understands why your loop is unexpectedly failing.

Why It Helps?

They’re involved with the code to a fault. You are too close to the problem. You probably know the feeling. You read the sentence ten times, and now it means nothing. This is also true for code. You continue to read it, and your mind just checks out.

This is how having someone help with your code has saved me at least a dozen times now:

1. They catch the silly mistakes. A lot of the time, you just need someone to say, “Hey, you missed the bracket.”
2. They help clarify the logic errors that you wouldn’t see. One person pointed out to me once that my for loop didn’t end under certain circumstances. I was staring at that code for hours.
3. You learn sooner. Weirdly, seeing someone solve a problem gives you even more “aha” moments than struggling with your own code.

It feels less lonely. Coding can feel lonely, especially when everyone around you knows what’s going on while the screen in front of you continues to alert you with red error messages. It helps so much to get help.

The Help in Singapore Hit Different

One of the great things about looking for programming help in Singapore is that the response times align well with my strange schedule. I no longer need to wait until 3 AM to hear back from someone in a different time zone. Some Programming Assignment Helper sites are surprisingly compliant for research students.

One site I found even let me send them screenshots, rough drafts, and other panic messages at some ungodly hour as I wondered what was going wrong. I wasn’t hiring someone to “do it” for me; it was like having a little bit of a safety net every time I hit a wall.

And let’s admit, a lot of us are already getting “help” with our assignments in one form or another. Maybe it is someone we know, maybe a teaching assistant, maybe a forum, maybe a Discord group. This is a more organized (and, to be honest, sometimes less harsh) version of that.

You Will Thank Me for This Advice

Should you end up in that gray area, too tired to press on, too embarrassed to request assistance, know that you can permit yourself to ask for help. Asking for assignment help doesn’t negate your abilities; whether it’s support from a colleague, in an online forum, or through a legitimate programming help service, it simply makes you a learner. A person. Who may be feeling a little sleepy, drinking iced coffee in the library, doing their best, is the way of life for students in Singapore.