The honest decision
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I fell in love with programming almost by accident. And it wasn’t because of the argument I had with Brendan Eich in twitter. He’s that far-right that him spreading fake news from extremist spanish VOX party made more sense to him than talking about programming. What a waste.
I hated programming at the university, but who wouldn’t hate ADA or old Haskell? They even made me take exams on a paper…ON A PAPER!
Are they still doing that?
Years later, I found myself working with my father, not doing anything similar to “if else” statements or hideous “for loops”. They should call it beep boop machine loops.
The computers at my father’s office were super slow. The term is “annoyingly slow” or “I could throw the keyboard and PC tower through out the window” like a greek javelin thrower in the siege of troy. The mythical “angry german kid” video exemplifies those times in detail
Following the analogy, the Windows ninety something that was installed in them was like a trojan horse
In addition to that, I needed help with a task that I had to do manually for accounting every month. It was so time consuming that I knew I needed a script of some sort in an accessible programming language that I could learn fast. What did I do?
I tried to trick a friend into writing that script instead. YOLO
But it didn’t work, he basically told me to learn python and do it by myself.
Blessed is the man who, having nothing to say, abstains from giving us wordy evidence of the fact. George Eliot
So I said, fuck it, I’m gonna learn python.
It worked.
Even though it was hard to learn from scratch, at first of course, and that I didn’t remember those “beep boop machine loops”, it worked so nicely that I used to stare at the screen at the art piece I created with a big smile. I’m coding, and I feel like I’m doing magic. Is that feeling familiar to you?
Men go to far greater lengths to avoid what they fear than to obtain what they desire. Dan Brown, The Da Vinci code.
I remember being hooked on the Da Vinci code around the same time and it was a light and pleasant experience, not like those boring classics that made me read at school when I was a teenager. I didn’t understand them.
The story was good Mr Brown, thanks, I had a good time, but it felt like I was just scratching the surface here. Like watching Indiana Jones.
Where was the real life? I wasn’t a teenage anymore.
Where were the struggles?
Well, I said…
fuck it, I’m gonna read Dostoevsky.
Shit, that was real! what about Orwell?…
It changed my life
Reading other type of books like the “javascript bible” or “the good parts” (snores) didn’t change my life, and some parts were extremely boring…
Don’t take the joke personally Mr. Crockford, I also saw you snoring at Javascript conferences
…but they helped me master my craft and grow as a programmer, in an honest way.
I usually pay my respects to the profession every now and then, and study about the subjects I’m gonna be working on in an honest way.
And there is no better way to cheer up and motivate yourself to make the honest decision than to saying…
occasionally…
fuck it.