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Discussion on: What made you want to become a dev?

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aspittel profile image
Ali Spittel • Edited

I walked into a computer science classroom five years ago not knowing what code was. I had no context on how computers worked, how programming worked, or even what a programming language was. I quickly fell in love with writing Python, I thought it was awesome how I could build something useful and run it on my computer!

I re-fell in love with programming when I learned webdev with JavaScript, HTML, and CSS. I could build webpages that were fully interactive relatively easily!

To quote the amazing Sandi Metz:

Those of us whose work is to write software are incredibly lucky. Building software is a guiltless pleasure because we get to use our creative energy to get things done. We have arranged our lives to have it both ways; we can enjoy the pure act of writing code in sure knowledge that the code we write has use. We produce things that matter. We are modern craftspeople, building structures that make up present-day reality, and no less than bricklayers or bridge builders, we take justifiable pride in our accomplishments.

This all programmers share, from the most enthusiastic newbie to the apparently jaded elder, whether working at the lightest weight Internet startup or the most staid, long-entrenched enterprise. We want to do our best work. We want our work to have meaning. We want to have fun along the way.

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Jake Varness

I've never heard that quote before today. Eloquently put 😁

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aspittel profile image
Ali Spittel

Ah! It's in the intro to her book "Practical Object Oriented Design in Ruby" which is probably my favorite coding book of all time -- highly recommend

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Jake Varness

Thanks for the reference! I like reading technical books so I'll need to check that out

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theredspy15 profile image
Hunter Drum • Edited

Wow, that's a really good quote!