Being a developer

How is the life of a developer like.
I just released stup, a tool for easily keeping organized daily notes in the terminal. You can find it on GitHub here.

I can’t really remember the first time I saw a computer. I do remember though that “working on a computer” was the first thing that came to my mind when I was asked “What do you want to do when you grow up?”.

Years later, being both a grown up and a developer, I ask myself:

Now that you know, if you were a kid again, would you still want to be working on computers when you grew up?

Let’s see what a life for a developer means to me so far.

My friends

Some of my friends believe that:

  • when I do stuff on the computer, many windows with progress bars making strange alien movie sounds appear constantly
  • I smoke and drink coffee in front of at least two monitors till early morning moving my head like cats do when flies pass by
  • I can hack the whole universe, I just don’t do it because there’s no need

The others believe that:

  • I am an expert in printing email attached zip files
  • I am an expert in converting a scanned image to a Microsoft office document
  • I’m not good at my work because I don’t know how to set a formula in excel
  • even though they were asked by the store if they wanted the OS installed on their brand new laptop, I should be the one to install it

My family

My mother believes that:

  • it’s always a good time to call to ask from me to visit her friend with a new TV in order to program the channels
  • I can handle any device with buttons
  • I lie when I explain that the bug I was talking about is not a real one and that I should be cleaning the house more regularly

My older siblings believe that:

  • something went wrong and my parents should have stopped at them

Other developers

Other developers believe that:

  • the technologies I use suck unless they use them too
  • I understand them when they talk about all existing technologies, tech abbreviations and conferences
  • we should go for drinks at a regular basis otherwise we will all end up alone

Cats

My cat believes that:

  • my computer is her accessory and I can play with it only if I let her hunt the mouse pointer
  • nothing bad can happen when she steps on keyboard while I’m workingal;kdjfh;lkashkj

The truth

The truth is that being a developer is cool besides the fact that:

  • even though you think of yourself like Neo, sometimes you might be working for hours on aligning a div vertically in the middle of its container.
  • even though it’s called MySQL, sometimes it might not feel so “My”
  • even though you mkdir best_idea_ever on Saturday morning you end your weekend with sudo rm -rf ./best_idea_ever
  • it’s 2015 and the only thing that renders the same way to all browsers is the about:blank
  • you read this post to find code snippets