I upgraded my WordPress installation a week or two ago (two, actually) and it broke the plugins I wrote to allow mood, music, and photos to be posted. I finally got around to fixing them (just a matter of changing the hook and a few cosmetic bits) and everything seems to be peachy. Great, I’m sure you noticed and cared.
Look, I won’t lie to you: I love programming. I love the act of doing it, I love thinking about it, solving problems with it, the philosophy behind it, learning the culture of it, and increasing my skill at writing light, fast, portable, effective, elegant code (wooo buzzwords). It is my craft and my trade and I’m insanely happy to be waist-deep in it. But here’s the problem with loving something like programming: you can’t talk to anyone else about it, except maybe the people you work with, because nobody else understands or cares.
I mean, if your trade happens to be music, like if you’re in a band, then you can talk to anybody about it and anybody will be interested because everybody likes music. And if you’re a fashion designer, everybody loves clothes (some more than others, not to Dan any names), or if you’re a movie producer or actor, everybody loves movies and you can have a conversation with anybody in the world about movies and they’ll find it really interesting. Doctor? I mean, sure, you can’t have conversations about your trade because it’s too skilled and requires too much training, but you can still have stories that interest other people, and so on. But if I told you a story about programming (as I often do), you would pass out (but you don’t when I tell them because I cut them short). It’s hideously interesting to me, tracking down bugs and upgrading software to work with the new implementation and adopting all the latest trends and technologies, but no one else cares! Who can I have a reasonable conversation with about programming? Who won’t get bored? Can I even have conversations about computing topics in general without causing you mental trauma? Would you like it if I tried to interact with you about packaging software for easy distribution? What if I started talking about file binary formats and which kernel is the best? Would you be interested? No, you’d get a headache and wish that you were anywhere else, perhaps across the room by the chips and dip, or at least that I would shut up and get a life.
The problem is, I HAVE that life that you’re wishing I would get, and computers are it! It’s the part of my life I enjoy most, and I can say with a good deal of certainty that I’m happiest when I’m computing. But I always feel like I have to, you know, sort of keep that area sectioned off over there, because, man, nobody knows about that so I’ll keep what I talk about down to what other people care about. Well, that came out more haughty than I intended, I mean, I’m sure lots of people in very specialized professions feel this way. And I’m not trying to complain, I’m just… well, hell, it’s my blog and I can talk about what I want to. It doesn’t have to be anything. Also, I can cry if I want to, since it’s my party, although I have heard that big girls don’t cry-yi-yi, so that’s something to keep in mind next time you get a lil’ misty-eyed.
One last thing: we did not start that fire. Okay? It has always been burning, ever since the world’s been turning. So back up off, ‘fore you start somepin’ ya’ll regret, mang.
January 13th, 2006 at 8:39 am
You’re right, I didn’t light the fire, but I tried to fight it, okay?
Is the word “site” new in your action phrase “set as site background”, did it used to just say “set as background”, or am I just that poor at noticing things?
Thirdly, since now seemed like as good a time to start numbering as any, I think you’re right that everyone feels like this in specified industries, but I don’t think you realize that every industry is specified. Musicians probably want to talk about how their band has special equipment to tune the bass to what the audience is hearing so that blah blah blah, but they can’t, so they talk about how, ‘yeah, we do kinda sound like Coldplay thanks a lot uninformed groupie.’ Clothes designers want to talk about how hard it is to find strong seam thread that doesn’t overwhelm the pattern, but they have to talk to most people about how, ‘thanks, it does look like something from J Crew, hippie.’
My point is this, yes, no-one knows or cares about what you do, but if you focus on the application that they are familiar with, rather than the process that is foreign, you can probably get some decent small talk at of people at the least.
“Don’t you hate it when websites take you to dead end pages that don’t link back to a starting point? I went through mine and fixed that with all sorts of crazy jazz.”
“Oh, that’s what you do? Yeah, that’s awesome! I hate that, J Crew’s website is just like that. You wanna go get some chips and dip together, handsome?”
or you know, something like that
January 13th, 2006 at 3:20 pm
The nice thing about being at a school that focuses on engineering, all of us are specialized and can’t talk to people in the real world because we’re lost in our world of math and science, but we’re able to have a full campus life and interact and do everything normally because we all understand each other in our little world of Mines. And I didn’t fully realize how far off I was into my Mines bubble until I started going to a college church group that was mostly made up of non-Mines people, and they all looked at me strange every time I tried to talk about my really exciting polymers and thermodynamics. So I retreated back to my engineering bubble =)
I’ve come to terms with the fact that I’m going to have to marry an engineer, or someone that does something similar, because I couldn’t spend the rest of my life with someone who didn’t understand what I was talking about when I tell them that there are new polyethylene terephthalates coming out that will revolutionize plastic bags in grocery stores and how you just can’t buy the cheap soaps because they have super crappy surfactants due to shortcuts taken when making the product….
So in short, I feel your pain…and stick to the bubble =P
January 14th, 2006 at 5:23 pm
You’re just being whinny… I can totally understand your situation. It’s the same for me. I can’t spit out two words about DnD before Sarah’s eyes gloss over. It’s something only a small circle of people can realte to and talk about. It’s truly wonderful that you get that kind of enjoyment out of your chosen career. Very few people do. Now you just have to find a way to express it. Don’t go into details. Just say “hey, there was this problem with the logic in this sub-program that was screwing everything up and I used my super-brain and figured it out” and that will suffice. Being specialized in programming is as out-there as it gets, so this will be an issue as long as you let it. Also, you could talk to me about it and I could pretend to know what you’re talking about…
January 16th, 2006 at 3:02 am
Wow, I was mentioned in your post, yay. You’ll have to let me know when we are going to go get pierced and also keep in mind that I have those comp tickets for 415 and would love to take you with me, although I am going to save one for a certain some1 that is turning 21 here pretty soon. Righto thanks for the mention, even if it was meant to be sort of a shot at my character, although a true one at that. Right.
Dan J.
January 17th, 2006 at 1:52 am
Yeah, microbiologists can’t really talk to anyone else either… I mean, who really cares that yeast has a nonsense-mediated decay pathway and that the genes UPF1, UPF2, and UPF3 are major regulators of it or that in ADR1 deletion strains the yeast cells don’t grow as well on media with lactate as a carbon source. And no one else really knows what the acronym PCR stands for or why it’s important in all of our lives, or even cares why it is. No one really cares all that much about the gazillions of bacteria living everywhere. Including you… So yeah, I understand… And I also understand one of the previous comments that talked about polyethylene polymers and surfactants… it comes from having taken two semesters of organic chemistry…