Here’s Why I Choose To Write And Dream On The Internet Instead Of Learning To Code
It seems like everyone is coding or learning to code these days.
Coding is cool. Everyone should code right? If you can code, you can make big bucks from big companies.
I taught myself enough about coding to realize I don’t want to do it on a regular basis. Around 2004 I read a book on HTML, which is not an actual programming language, but it was foreign enough to me to count as a big deal. It felt like programming to me even though it wasn’t. I was really proud of myself when I learned how to create an onmouseover event. This is how I taught myself how to create websites back in the early 2000's.
After I finished reading an HTML manual and made some simple websites for myself, I realized I could earn money by making websites for other people. I became a freelance web designer overnight.
But there was one problem: I hated making websites for other people.
They were too picky and some people didn’t pay me. I had send invoices to get my money and soon, the whole thing seemed too boring and tedious. The fire was gone. I gave up making websites for people almost as fast as I had started.
I continued only improving my own website, called Wrongland. I’ll never forget the day I put in the word, ‘wrongland’ in a search query and returned zero results. I thought I was a genius for thinking of this ‘wrongland’ website concept. Well, I didn’t have a concept, just a new word that had never existed before.
I thought I would soon build a website that would make me a millionaire. Well, I didn’t have a business plan or anything, but I had wild ideas, and I figured it would be just a matter of time before my wild ideas would spill out into the world and somehow make me money.
The whole purpose of my site was to reward curious people instead of making money.
I had weird things hidden in random places on random pages in my site, and when someone found one, a message would pop up, “You just won a plastic sandwich!” I would then request their mailing address, and send them a plastic sandwich in the mail. I remember dying to be able to see the person’s face when the plastic sandwich was delivered to them.
Not surprisingly, I never became a millionaire from my Wrongland website. I had no monetization strategy. This was before internet advertising existed. This was pre-Google. The only thing I got was bored. The onmouseover events lost their luster and so did the work of hiding the gifts inside the website. Writing websites in HTML just became tedious to me. Then came Dreamweaver and MySpace, which I embraced very quickly. Let’s see, where was I? I got off track.
Now it’s 2017.
Facebook is basically dead for me. I joined Steemit.com last year. I now work for two different decentralized autonomous organizations. I am earning cryptocurrency and have mostly revolutionized my entire life. I don’t have a boss, and I get to work in my pajamas. I made my dream of writing and dreaming on the internet a reality, after 7 years of trying to figure it all out.
Even though I don’t know how to code, I have a bot running in a Russian Steemitesque site called Golos. This means I’m officially a robot shepherd. My little bot makes me money, only a little bit right now. I used to have a voting bot running in Steemit too, which maximized my curation rewards, but I disabled it. I want to have all my votes cast by me, a human.
Social capital in the form of a high reputation in Steemit has opened up many opportunities to become friends with programmers. I don’t need to know how to code in order to have a bot made for me. I can ask a programmer to make me a bot and I can give some of the rewards back to the programmer.
Within a group of programmers, you need some flexible people to act as glue between them. I would love to learn some programming languages, but I understand that I don’t have time. I am better utilized as glue than another solitary programmer.
I also understand that my main skills (communication, visualization, synthesis, super connecting) need to be utilized in order to bring about greater societal changes.
If there’s one thing I learned by being surrounded by a large group of programmers it’s this: it’s necessary to have artists and good communicators work side-by-side with programmers to ensure that normal people can understand what the programmers are building.
A lot of programmers that I’ve interacted with on Steemit for the last year are pathetic communicators. They simply don’t want to spend the effort to explain what they are building in a way that regular people understand. There is a real divide between those who are building technology and those who are learning using it. And it seems that very little thought is even given to addressing the communication divide.
If you want a job in the future but you don’t like to program, learn how to become friends with programmers. You’re going to need them, just as they will need you.
