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[The December Days theme this year is "Things I Used To Fully Believe About Myself." Some of these things might be familiar, some of them might be things you still believe about yourself, and some of them may be painful and traumatic for you based on your own beliefs and memories. The nice thing about text is that you can step away from it at any point and I won't know.]
#8: "I am not a coder."
The RNG decided to be merciful and give us a lighter topic for this post.
Despite coming of age during the part of history where minicomputers and microcomputers were getting hooked up to networks in great quantity thanks to the Hypetext Transfer Protocol and the accompanying Hypertext Markup Language producing what we now think of as The Internet, but is actually more properly title the World Wide Web (as The Internet encompasses place with different protocols, like Gopher, file transfer protocols (and FTP itself), news readers, and other things built on top of the Transmission Control Protocol / Internet Protocol and the ARPANet network expanded past the Department of Defense and various universities), my interest in technology mostly stayed with games and playing games rather than jumping out into the world of electronics assembly, solder flux, wiring, circuits, circuit boards, and programming.
( All The Ways I Did Code and Electronics Things While Not Considering Myself A Coder )
As it turns out with a lot of these "I don't" or "I can't" statements, the correct response to me saying that is to interrogate what I mean when I say that. When you calibrate to "can create ex nihilo," you think that you're not doing something you absolutely are. And, as I have snarled at least a few times as I have gotten older, there are very few times in your life or your work where you will be expected to do something completely from scratch and memory, without references, scaffolds, or materials to consult to help you build the thing. Pops mentioned that for many of the examinations he undertook, the professors would allow someone to write as many formulae as they wanted on the cheat sheet they could bring with them. Because the point was not that you had the formulae memorized, the point was that you knew in what situations to use them. (Insert the joke about the six thousand dollar chalk mark here.)
I do not code professionally. I do not consider myself anything more than an amateur at many things related to code and its creation. But I can code, or learn how to do that thing in code, and that makes me a coder. (And that makes a lot of other people coders, too, even if they will be met by gatekeepers telling them Stallman says you must code in this obscure a language to ride the ride.)
#8: "I am not a coder."
The RNG decided to be merciful and give us a lighter topic for this post.
Despite coming of age during the part of history where minicomputers and microcomputers were getting hooked up to networks in great quantity thanks to the Hypetext Transfer Protocol and the accompanying Hypertext Markup Language producing what we now think of as The Internet, but is actually more properly title the World Wide Web (as The Internet encompasses place with different protocols, like Gopher, file transfer protocols (and FTP itself), news readers, and other things built on top of the Transmission Control Protocol / Internet Protocol and the ARPANet network expanded past the Department of Defense and various universities), my interest in technology mostly stayed with games and playing games rather than jumping out into the world of electronics assembly, solder flux, wiring, circuits, circuit boards, and programming.
( All The Ways I Did Code and Electronics Things While Not Considering Myself A Coder )
As it turns out with a lot of these "I don't" or "I can't" statements, the correct response to me saying that is to interrogate what I mean when I say that. When you calibrate to "can create ex nihilo," you think that you're not doing something you absolutely are. And, as I have snarled at least a few times as I have gotten older, there are very few times in your life or your work where you will be expected to do something completely from scratch and memory, without references, scaffolds, or materials to consult to help you build the thing. Pops mentioned that for many of the examinations he undertook, the professors would allow someone to write as many formulae as they wanted on the cheat sheet they could bring with them. Because the point was not that you had the formulae memorized, the point was that you knew in what situations to use them. (Insert the joke about the six thousand dollar chalk mark here.)
I do not code professionally. I do not consider myself anything more than an amateur at many things related to code and its creation. But I can code, or learn how to do that thing in code, and that makes me a coder. (And that makes a lot of other people coders, too, even if they will be met by gatekeepers telling them Stallman says you must code in this obscure a language to ride the ride.)
