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