coding

Below is Walt Whitman’s When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer

When I heard the learn’d astronomer,
When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me,
When I was shown the charts and diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them,
When I sitting heard the astronomer where he lectured with much applause in the lecture-room,
How soon unaccountable I became tired and sick,
Till rising and gliding out I wander’d off by myself,
In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time,
Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars.

The same poem read by one of the humans on Librivox

Read by the Character Gale on Breaking Bad

Here is the same poem displayed using javascript, via codepen:

See the Pen JgjdjP by bluthgeld (@bluthgeld) on CodePen.

Can you see the differences among these items?

***

Earlier this week I shared a link to a Twitter thread that had been making it round my timeline:

Until I hard read this thread I had never clocked the concept of a “10X developer.”

On, you haven’t either? That’s probably best for the best; it’ll save you from the anxiety of believing that it’s something you should be.

A 10X engineer or developer is said to be a man – always a man – who can do 10 times the work of the average developer in the same number of hours. Whether this man/machine hybrid actually exists in the meatverse is subject to much debate in the darkest depths of Reddit and the Twitter Machine. Still, that controversy hasn’t stopped developers and coders from putting “10X” in their bios/linked in pages, and hiring managers and Vulture capitalists like the dude above from hunting that particular Unicorn.

I’ve worked with these guys before. Not just Developers/Engineers, but also sysadmin, guys who couldn’t be bothered to put on clean jorts or show up for a mid-day meeting. He’s got more important things to do, like manning the ramparts against midnight blackhats or playing WoW.

To a Carpenter, Every Problem is a Nail
Probably Your Dad…

They are insanely good at ticking off the bullet points on their job description, there is no doubt about that. However, they fail at the soft stuff: working with others, listening, considering thoughts/feelings/opinions of anyone “nontechnical.” A developer with the attributes listed in the Twitter thread may be able to make magic, but only the magic that they want to create. You won’t have a conversation with them over the watercooler. And they will not see any solution to a problem that goes beyond their own experience with the world. To a Carpenter, Every Problem is a Nail.

Like white, male developers building facial recognition technology that mistakes black women for men, narrow thinking, tunnel vision, and limited experience can bake limitations into our code.

And that would be fine if HR and hiring managers were just looking for these magical beings, these 10X Unicorns. But executives, looking to maximize their hiring dollars, absolutely look for these attributes in the Quarter Horses¹ who do the actual work of making a company full of actual human beings produce software to be used by other human beings.

If you ask about work-life balance during an interview and the hiring manager gives an ironic smile, you can believe there is none. They want 10X in 100% of their people.

***

The value of a Liberal Arts education has taken a beating, since at least the first half of the Clinton administration. I have a fine arts degree. When I left high school and took the Amtrak up to Boston to learn how to tell stories, many of my peers went into engineering, hard sciences, medicine, computer science. A lot of people thought I was insane.

Here’s a typical dictum, from Sun Microsystems cofounder Vinod Khosla: “Little of the material taught in Liberal Arts programs today is relevant to the future.”
As said by someone who’s never read a book…

I can remember, distinctly, listening to Tom Friedman on some morning talk show, pontificating about how the world, as flat as it was, would need American’s to be the managers of the information society. An American (man), he implied, would be best served with a background in a very specific science or a very specific technical skill (like plumbing). Art, music, books, would still exist, of course, but for downtime, weekends, vacation. In the 90s, we were all headed for 4 day workweeks.

To the leaders of the free world, philosophy, history, art were hobbies to be pursued after we provided management to the workers of the world.

Still, it looks like the recognized value of a solid, well rounded liberal arts education is resurgent:

If we want to prepare students to solve large-scale human problems, Hartley argues, we must push them to widen, not narrow, their education and interests. He ticks off a long list of successful tech leaders who hold degrees in the humanities. To mention just a few CEOs: Stewart Butterfield, Slack, philosophy; Jack Ma, Alibaba, English; Susan Wojcicki, YouTube, history and literature; Brian Chesky, Airbnb, fine arts. Of course, we need technical experts, Hartley says, but we also need people who grasp the whys and hows of human behavior.
What matters now is not the skills you have but how you think. Can you ask the right questions? Do you know what problem you’re trying to solve in the first place? Hartley argues for a true “liberal arts” education—one that includes both hard sciences and “softer” subjects. A well-rounded learning experience, he says, opens people up to new opportunities and helps them develop products that respond to real human needs.

***

This blog is a self hosted WordPress blog. The WordPress motto is “Code is Poetry.” Until my time at Flatiron, I hadn’t thought someone would believe that.

Poetry, like a photograph or a painting or a novel, is an object crafted by a human being. Not unlike Ruby or Javascript. It is designed to transmit information. Not just the facts on the page, but an emotion or feeling from the writer to the reader. Yes, art does fail to achieve this more often than not, though even objectively “bad” poetry will mean something, to someone. Rearrange the words on the page, change the structure or the syntax of a sentence and even that can mean something. See the work of e.e. cummings.

Code, on the other hand, fails completely when syntax and structure is not met exactly. Remove this line from the codepen above and see what happens:

const main = document.querySelector('main')

Code is a set of specific instructions from a human to a compiler on a computer. It may be satisfying to write it well, to achieve the same programming objective with fewer lines than the time before. To be efficient. Code itself transmits no meaning or feeling to a reader; what it produces may, but the code itself does not.

Code is the book. Code is the paper, the letterpress, the type, the ink. Code is the glue and binding. Code is even the postage stamp and brown kraft padded envelope that brings a slim volume of poetry to my house.

But it’s not the poetry. Words infused with human feeling and human thoughts, absent precise grammar, syntax, or even punctuation can still bring joy to the reader, bridge understanding between two people. The same is not true with code. Broken code fails completely to impart meaning to neither a human nor a computer. Code, when successful, is meaningful for what it imparts, not what it is.

***

Anyone can write a poem. Anyone can write code.² To believe that they are somehow equivalent constructions betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of art and communication between actual people. In much of my reading, some work experience, and the links above suggest that there are those in our field that make hiring and firing decisions based on the idea that the arts and soft sciences are not important. That a coder should have no interests other than code. That coding is *the* solution, not the mechanism for delivering a solution.

If we don’t know or care about how people will use our software, we will fail. Or worse, create problems that cannot be refactored out of our code. See Facebook and disinformation or Twitter and hate. Both of these entrenched problems stem from a fundamental lack of understanding by their creators, willful or otherwise, of how humans use their products or how people share ideas. Zuckerberg and Dorsey can not see solutions to the problems they have created for our society. Not because there aren’t solutions, but rather, their owners do not have the imagination (or access to people with that imagination) to identify or implement solutions.

To stretch that metaphor to the breaking point ↩
At least, that’s the promise of the Flatiron program. ↩

One of the benefits of having a kid is the opportunity to read with them: brand new books; stories you have known all your life; stories you wished you had read. It’s a chance for you to grow and learn as a family.

Before reading it together, I had known the broad outlines of the Zen koan, Banzo’s Sword. It’s the story of a young man, desperate to impress his father, finds the sword master Banzo and insist Banzo train him. Banzo agrees. The young man asks how long it will take to become a master. Bazo tells him a lifetime. Too long, the young man says. He tries to bargain with Bazo, offers to be his servant, and with every offer the time to mastery grows. Eventually, the young man realizes that he can’t get to mastery without putting in the work and being patient. I recommend that you read Bazo’s tale here.

This is also the plot to Karate Kid.

***

I fell in love with the X-Files in it’s second or third season, in dark basement in Centreville, Virginia. A friend introduced me to Mulder and Scully and the Consipracy through her brother’s library of VHS recordings off the air. We went our separate ways – college in different states – but I kept up with the X-Files until the end and I have all seasons on DVD – except, strangely, Season 4.

Viewers may remember the The Lone Gunman. Byers, Frohike, and Langly were allies of Fox Mulder and Dana Scully, who ran The Lone Gunman, a publication that explored conspiracy theories (i.e., Lee Harvey Oswald was either a patsy or part of a larger conspiracy, the was filmed by Stanley Kubric on a soundstage in Hollywood, Extraterrestrials walked among us. ). They provided what could be charitably described as “operational support” for Mulder and Sculley, including legwork, photography, and hacking/phreaking, in service of the Agent’s search for the truth in the alien invasion conspiracy.

Sometimes they got up to their own shenanigans.

I do prefer the one-off X-File episodes over the Conspiracy, if only because the Conspiracy was bleak. Check out Jose Chung’s “From Outer Space” or Musings of a Cigarette Smoking Man.

Another, Unusual Suspects is the Mulder/Gunmen origin story. In a scene with a character, “Holly,” who is running from the Cigarette Smoking Man, when she asks him about his hacking skills, Frohike tells her that his “Kung Fu is the Best.” The phrase, a kung fu film trope and well-worn in-group code from the black-trench-coat-and-combat-boot nerds, struck in my brain. I liked it so much at the time that I added it as my signature on my home printed business cards.

I seriously I thought that was sufficient to will myself to success (whatever that means) without having to actually put in any work. I had no patience. Success as a writer would find me.

***

I’ve had a lot of jobs since college and no explicit plan other than to be a kick ass novelist: Sales Associate, early morning chyrons for major market TV, secretary, program coordinator, and secretary. I thought the novel would come by magic and my future set. Eventually I decided to turn the only skill that I spent any time actually working on and turn it into a corporate career. I took a certificate in Technical Writing and through the power of nepotism found a job doing that for a small software company.

And over the last 13 years the job grew far outside that specific title. The knowledge I built up writing about our software products made it natural that I should also do pre- and post- sales. And live trainings. Marketing material. Trade shows. We were part of a much smaller company then and everyone did what they needed to do to move things forward. Honestly, I really liked it. I like having a skill or knowledge people appreciate. Still, nearly everyone who’s ever known me longer than 5 minutes thinks it strange that I’m a damned good capitalist.

I had no explicit plan. I took opportunities as they came (opportunities that are only available to a select few, I remind myself; I’m a stupid lucky human being) and eventually found something I genuinely liked to do.

My kung fu is just okay.

***

That friend popped up on my radar a few years ago. I happened upon an article she wrote about her distrust of Gwyneth Paltrow’s Goop. We reconnected on Twitter. Soon, she found global internet fame from her piece on Brigid Hughes, the second editor of the Paris Review, and how she was erased from the history of that publication by that publication and, among others, the New York Times. She advocates for the remembrance and recognition of women in the arts, especially those who have been edited out. She started a quarterly journal and a bookstore, as a single mom, an American living in the UK.

And if you were not paying attention, while her success might seem as the work of magi, she has made a series of explicit choices large and small that move her to her goal. Choices invisible to all but those who care the most. But as she will tell you – and has told others who make the same assumption – she’s put in the hours building her knowledge, skills, and “brand.” She’s put in the work on her kung fu.

***

This is not the same scale. I’m not shining a light on long suppressed, yet fantastic, women authors. I want to build software that makes life just a little bit easier. I don’t want to disrupt life; I want to help smooth out the bumpy trail so we can all get to where we need to be.

I’ve put in 13 years. I’ve got some skills. My kung fu is not the best. Not yet.

I starting my third week of a 15 week Coding Boot Camp at Flatiron. With the support of my family and an okay from my supportive boss, I am taking Vacation/Leave to learn to code, to add that skill to my set of tools. When I finish, I will be armed with the skills to help me be closer to that kung fu mastery that I wanted to advertise on that cheap business card nearly a quarter century ago.

To some, this may seem like a giant, brave (or insane) leap into the unknown. To all those who love me the most, this is the next, small logical step in my pursuit of happiness and some kick-ass moves.

Code is NOT Poetry

My Kung Fu