It’s in our eyes and how we operate
Some articles just feel like they come from your own mouth. As if you slipped a bribe to a professional writer and they took the words right out of your mouth. As with any powder-keg argument, there are obvious flaws in logic and zealotry issues, but the vitriol and eloquence is enough for me to write out a Valentines card for Charlie Brooker. The pretentiousness of the adverts is well documented in other places (and well parodied elsewhere) and when you get down to brass-tacks, when you cut right to it, it isn’t about “PC” and “Mac” it’s about Windows and OSX. It’s argument which has been flogged to death without Apple glamming it up and whoring it all over town. The delicious irony I found was the banner and boxout adverts The Guardian site was running at the time.
Programmers Don’t Like to Code
Then some articles say something you always felt, gnawing at like a splinter until someone comes along with some tweezers. The idea of a programmer not liking to code is, on the surface, laughable but the argument is compelling. It elucidates why with every project I start I feel like rewriting everything, Etch-a-sketching what I’ve done before and just starting anew; why I staunchly refuse to use tried and tested frameworks like Cake or Prado and continue to use my own medium-rare monstrosity. The idea of using someone else’s code is a worrying one at first, that you would relinquish your implicit knowledge and control to a programmer or group of programmers you’ve never even met. The depth of that mistrust really defines you as a programmer, the programmers who craft compilers and work Assembly are the ones who are never happy with just accepting those fluffy, abstracted layers. And at every stage from there, you have a programming level that you settle in to, your comfort zone of just how much intrinsic control you’re willing to sacrifice to get something done and maybe even have fun doing it along the way.
Someone asked me today about starting their own blog and what they should write about. I would have told them they were asking the wrong person had I not already figured out what this blog was for, what this blog is about. I said that I write for me, because it’s something I enjoy and I’m going to keep on writing until I either figure out my subject, or I stop. I’m not about to kid myself that I’m interesting or witty enough to write about a single topic, so like life, like this blog, like this post it’s a bit all over the place.
