Day 29–30 and beyond: Reflections on the first thing I made.
>>> A musing overall summary
In the scramble before our career day preparations, I took a purposeful break from these summaries of Athena. I know that what I write now is colored by hindsight and curated by the thoughtful reflections that come when you are forced to explain, repeatedly, something you have made to other people.
In many ways, the experience has felt a lot like the difference between writing music and lyrics alone, locked away in a studio room in the depths Ewell Hall, and singing a song you’ve written to an audience. When I wrote songs in college, I would sometimes start with a little three-note ditty, try to flesh it out into a melody, and then eventually grab some words out of the air in my brain and help them to match up. Other times it was more like poetry; I had something to say so the words came freely, and the music to match was a struggle, laboriously pounded out and usually a direct reflection of whatever songs I was listening to at the time. But there were some glorious moments where both streams flowed simultaneously, and I had a good vision of where the song was headed. I loved those moments best.
When it came time to perform, it took me awhile to realize that the general audience experienced the music completely differently from the tiny parts I broke it into as the creator. They might think “oh, that’s a nice song” or “meh, it’s too slow.” They don’t see the layers right away, if at all.
This, to me, is like that eternal entry-level question of “are you interested in front-end or back-end?” Both! I think. Ferociously both. Both at the same time in those few lucky moments, or otherwise in whichever order makes the most sense for the song of my young engineering life. Of course, perhaps I feel that way now because I’ve mostly been a consumer of software, and don’t have a good idea of what it means to think hard about each layer individually. But I will find out.
There is a big caveat here, because of course, if your audience members are all musicians themselves, they see the layers immediately. And then they tend to comment about two extremes:
- Things with which they are most familiar: “Oh, I liked how you used the pentatonic scale bit during the bridge — do you like baroque music too?” To which I’d reply, yes, of course, Bach and I get on famously. I love math. I love scales. And off our conversation would go, me wondering all the while if perhaps I didn’t know enough about baroque music after all to even be having the conversation.
- Things with which they are completely unfamiliar: These always cause reflection in the creator and, for me, a different sort of self-undermining. “The oboe really isn’t so tricky,” I’d think. “All you need is a good year of practice with a single-reed instrument like the clarinet to build up your embouchure and then it’s basically playing the flute at a 90 degree angle.”
So it is with programming. Every complicated thing I did in my app now seems like the damn oboe, like it was simple to begin with, and how could I have struggled so much with it? Everything else people ask me about I catch myself wondering whether I know enough to be giving an answer they will agree with. Just yesterday I had an interviewer ask me whether the pages in my app were getting created on the client side or served up from the server. I balked. Client-side? I thought. That could be right?
Of course it wasn’t — most of the .html pages in my app are getting served from my Flask routes, though I do have one Ajax call in there to create the country quizzes based on the chosen region. So my answer should have been both. But it came out as a stutter instead.
There is a long, long way to go from here.
But did you see what I wrote up there? I had an interview! Yes! My first one! And oh, what a lovely moment it was, to be in an office of engineers, talking about the vast and ever-changing future of the software industry with other, very accomplished engineers, and to feel them start to see me as one of their own when they looked at my app, my little Athena in whom I now see only flaws and security holes, my undeniable physical proof that I can dream things up and make them and they have the potential to delight other people.
Imposter syndrome is a hot topic in tech right now, as it is in all fields with a diversity problem. I won’t belabor it here. It occurred to me this morning that for all the time I was working on a product as a non-engineer in my last job, I was screaming in my head “Let me in! I can help! I have ideas! I want to make things!” But there is no one bearded man standing at the locked door of software engineering, just waiting for you to show up with a password before he swings it wide open for you.
This is not academia. You let yourself in.
You have to build your own door, or more likely, steal someone else’s door and modify it to your specs. Then, you build a thousand more doors and prepare for a maze.
There is no tenure here. Things change all the time. And what a gift that is, because that’s the best opportunity I’ve got to meaningfully contribute and tromp around happily in the fresh snow of ideas while doing it.
So the question becomes; what to make next?
