Mar
1
B.A. English or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Code
Author Andy L. | Filed Under Miscellaneous | 2 Comments
How did I become a software developer? I think the best answer would be, by accident. How does one become a software developer by accident? It’s quite simple really, just follow these three steps: major in English; display no interest in journalism, marketing, or advertising; try to find a job. It should be fairly obvious that I left out one of the primary endpoints for English majors, teaching. My mother was a teacher, my wife was a teacher; notice the past tense. My mother’s teaching experience started off well but was plagued by years of bureaucratic indifference, mismanagement, and ingratitude. Nonetheless, she stuck with it for her entire professional career, that is until she was diagnosed with breast cancer. The connection between stress and cancer is still being studied, and if you’re that interested in the subject, there’s a fact sheet here, and a more recent NY Times article here. My wife lasted four years at her job, long enough to get tenure and become thoroughly disenchanted with the anti-meritocracy that the teaching community strives so hard to maintain. My mother’s experience caused me to view teaching as a profession of last resort, my wife’s experience convinced me that I should stay as far away as possible.
So where does that leave a recent grad and his freshly minted B.A. in English? Grasping at anything and everything that comes his way. I worked for a whopping $0 at a New York startup magazine for awhile. They covered commutation costs though. When the magazine decided to slim down after its first three issues failed to generate enough readership, I was asked to stay, but still not offered a salary. I was seven months out of college, I wanted to move in with my girlfriend (she’s my wife now), and I really wanted to move out of my parent’s house. I said no to work without pay and parted ways with the magazine. But something very important did happen during my time there: I had my first brush with programming for the web.
Like many developers that don’t have a CS or MIS degree, I came to programming through web technologies. It started with HTML, then CSS, then JavaScript, and then it stopped. Leaving the magazine meant an end to my self-instruction in web programming. I’d made a start, but it would be another six months before I would do anything programming related again. In that time, I got a job with an eKnowledge (that’s supposed to mean something, but it doesn’t) company, moved out of my parent’s house, and in with my girlfriend. The latter two were by the far the more important to me, and if the job wasn’t as interesting as I’d hoped, at least I was getting paid.
So here’s how someone really gets into software development:
Boss: “Have you ever done anything with a technology called Flash?”
Me: “Not really.”
Boss: “OK…Do you want to learn?”
Me: “Um. Sure.”
I bought a book; I spent a week with a developer in Houston who gave me a crash-course in programming fundamentals. Flash, and its proprietary programming language, ActionScript, were my real entry into software development. ActionScript is a middle to lightweight programming language. Languages like C,C++, and Java are the heavyweights. Earlier versions of ActionScript bore more than a passing resemblance to JavaScript, a lightweight language used in web programming. ActionScript has gone through several iterations in the few years that I’ve been working with it, becoming more robust and application oriented. The latest version is modeled on Java, effectively moving it into the middleweight category.
The upshot of all this: I learned to code and built a few small web applications. And that’s how I got hooked on programming. I left eKnowledge-land for a small startup in Manhattan, building web delivered applications, and managing and mentoring several other developers. I’m still learning though, making forays into Java and server-side development. After all, being a software developer, much like majoring in English, is a constant learning process; maybe that’s why I enjoy it so much.
Feb
25
Welcome, I think.
Author Andy L. | Filed Under Miscellaneous | 1 Comment
If you’re here, well, maybe you have too much free time on your hands. What can I say? Everyone else seems to have a blog, so why not me? To be quite honest, I’d never really thought about it until a recent college alumni event, where, to no one’s fault but my own, I had to repeatedly explain how I became a software developer after graduating college with a B.A. in English. The answer to that question will probably be the subject of a future post, but for now, back to the topic at hand.
In the past, I consoled myself by saying, “I write everyday…I just write code.” Now that sounds pretty bad, on multiple levels, by anyone’s standards, but it’s especially bad for someone who once had aspirations, and maybe still does, about actually seeing something published, on paper. Since I find that my trite little saying is no longer comforting, here we are. It’s not paper, but it’s a start.
While I have neither a degree in philosophy, nor years of enlightening experience on which to draw, I will still subject you to my ruminations on, as Douglas Adams so eloquently summed it up, “Life. The Universe. And Everything.” I have no idea what common theme, if any, my posts will contain (hence the Douglas Adams quote). In truth, my sole goal is to write something other than code, although I might post some of that here as well. I reserve the right to be as all over the map as I choose.
On another note, you may be wondering about the origins of the title of this blog. It is in fact a bastardization of an incredibly obscure quote from the movie, Aliens. That doesn’t actually explain why I chose it though. First, it is from one of my favorite movies. Second, the phrase is completely ambiguous when taken out of context. Is it a question, a statement, a command, something the receivers coach shouts to his wideouts before they take the field? It has a different meaning dependent entirely on punctuation and/or inflection. Finally, and this is a sort of corollary to my second reason, the phrase, even without punctuation or inflection, has many possible interpretations: be aware of your surroundings, be conscious of your choices and their potential outcomes, look out for the 6′, 190 lbs. cornerback that’s about to ruin your day, just to name a few. So there you have it, a few words with a lot of potential; I hope this blog has some as well.