Hypotheses of a rookie dev 1: Late night confessions

Because I make sense of things best when I am writing about them, here is me writing about tech. Who would have known? (Photo by Jantine Doornbos on Unsplash)

Hi, I’m Anne!

Here are some ramblings about the kind of content you can expect from me here, how I became interested in tech, and other thoughts on development + coding. I wrote half of this by hand at about 1am in a spurt of creativity after I’d finished freeCodeCamp’s first HTML project, so I might sound a little crazy. What can I say, making a little website with cat facts is no small feat.

I'm someone who had never, ever thought a career in STEM would be within reach. Even when I made the leap to leave my hometown, Barcelona, to study and work part time in the UK, I went for a university degree in literature. I'd always thought of myself as "a humanities person" and thought I was "useless at numbers or science." But then I had the chance to talk to a tech recruiter, and throughout our chat I had this feeling that since he believed in my potential, maybe it wasn’t that outlandish to try tech-related things. It was a wild realisation—and my hope is to one day be the person to break boundaries and say to another humanities enthusiast, "yeah, I know it sounds impossible, but you can actually do it."

What I really like about programming is that it lets me exercise this need to be constantly learning, because it’s simply an essential aspect of the process. There’s comfort in knowing you will always have something new to learn because 1) this encourages collaboration in a way that is so different from the kind of academic research environment I am used to, and 2) it gives me a sort of relief—you know, that deep down, it’s absolutely okay to not know everything. And that it might even be a good thing!

You see, I mainly learnt-by-doing as a kid. The elementary school I went to, El Martinet, uses a very different pedagogical framework than most others (loosely based on the Montessori method); I will always feel privileged that I had the chance to grow up in such a community. When I was young, I worked through holistic interdisciplinary projects and I was constantly learning from my fellow classmates, but I gradually left that behind in favour of more and more abstraction: first in high school when prepping for the national exams, then in my undergraduate degree in English and Drama, and finally during my research-based Classics MPhil degree at Cambridge.

So it is reassuring to find a discipline where I can go back to tinkering in a very tangible way (I know it sounds paradoxical, but I promise you it makes sense in my mind.) In fact, I picked up coding in a more serious way around the same time I started to sew my own clothes (starting with my masters graduation dress!), and to me, they feel like very similar things. It would surprise you how meticulous and mathematical patternmaking can get! And viceversa, when I’m coding, I picture one of those big builds you can find at Lego stores. In the Barcelona Lego store there is a huge, ultra-heavy recreation of the Sagrada Família cathedral. It’s cool because this whole thing is nearly 4-5m tall and super intimidating, but then you get closer and realise that actually, it’s made of thousands of tiny bricks that look mostly the same and are equally easy to assemble. Casey from Pattern Scout, whose sewing YouTube channel is extremely informative, talks about sewing as something that is really accessible in the sense that even complicated designer pieces can be boiled down to row after row after row of stitching. Kinda like assembling a huge replica of the Sagrada Família out of little Lego bricks. Or coding. (Maybe both, if you’re playing around on Scratch.)

I feel like those of you with more experience in the tech world will probably be thinking just how delusional I am, and you know what? I trust your opinion and you’re probably right, I am simplifying and idealising things. It’s because I find it easier to understand things if I do that. So for now I will take a little idealism, because it’s helping me make sense of this whole universe I’m only starting to explore. And when the Lego bricks crash down on me and I realise the extent of my utopian delusions about open-source and data science and pretty frontend HTML, well. Hopefully you’ll follow along too.