digitalBush

What got you excited about developing software?  Were you interested in moving buttons 10 pixels to the right because a business owner wants to nitpick every last detail?  Did you see a VB3 CRUD app and say to yourself "Wow, I want to do this every day of my life?" Maybe you wanted to sift through thousands of lines of stored procedures generated by some offshore development team. Was that it? Is that what got you hooked on computers? Hell No.

Tonight at the Nashville .NET User Group, we had a geek harvest.  I know Bryan Hunter was nervous about how the group would respond to the talk, but I'm here to say that it turned out great. We had one kid show off his Simon Says game written in Scratch. I think the initial draw for any kid to computers is the ability to create their own game, right?  Scratch makes that really easy.

The other presentation was from a friend's daughter. She has been working through Project Euler problems in Python. Then she showed off a fractal she also coded in Python. She's doing all of this on her own on her PC running Ubuntu.  Let that soak in for a second or two. Yeah, that's right. This teenage girl is more hardcore than most of the developers I've dealt with professionally.

Seeing those kids get excited about the things they had accomplished reminded me of the time I first became interested in computers. I wanted to learn how they worked. I wanted to reach out to people far away from my hometown. I wanted to create things. Tonight I got to relive that feeling vicariously through these kids.

I think it's far too easy to drown in the non-creative parts of our job. Dealing with users, crazy deadlines and supporting poorly developed solutions - these are all things we have to deal with that are mind-numbing at best. They distract us from the fact that our job is to tell computers what to do. We get to create a solution, put it into action and get immediate feedback on its success.  That's the good stuff right there.

If you are reading this and you are drowning in corporate hell writing CRUD apps in VB6, do yourself a favor: go home and find something cool that's going on in computing.  Learn a new programming language for the heck of it. Maybe you could write a silly game in javascript. Do something fun with a computer that lets you be creative again.

If you are a geek parent with children, do your kids a favor and show them how amazing it is to be able to build something that does exactly what it's told to do - nothing less and nothing more. Maybe you can spark a fire in them to create great things. At the very least, they'll understand the value of what you do for a living and appreciate the things they use on a day to day basis.

Computers aren't much magic to me anymore, but they can be for my child. Here's our chance to be a magician to our kids. Pull back the curtain and show them how empowering writing software can be.  Maybe it will even revive those old feelings you used to have hacking away late at night to the glow of a green screen.