Everything you need to know to become a techie

- or not.

Hello, tech adventurer!

First of all, let’s define a techie (from Oxford Languages):

a person who is expert in or enthusiastic about technology, especially computing.

Secondly, I apologize for disappointing you in a very early stage of this article, but putting such list together is not possible.

You may find several articles around presenting some signs that you are (or are not) a techie and, no matter what is the statement, they are always full of stereotypes. Quoting the Nigerian writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie in her TED Talk’s speech,

“The single story creates stereotypes, and the problem with stereotypes is not that they are untrue, but that they are incomplete. They make one story become the only story.”

I invite you to google ‘techie’ and see for yourself: usually a young white man who wears glasses and prefers the company of his smartphone rather than interacting with other people. You, the reader of this article, may be exactly the person I’ve just described. But the problem in here is that you may not be, I just can’t tell — and this doesn’t delegitimize how enthusiastic about technology you are neither your expertise in any tech related subject.

This takes us to another consideration about the how-to-become-a-techie list: technology must be for everyone. The fundamental question in technology is how to make people’s lives easier and that’s why technology is made by people for people, meaning that technology is people driven. Well, if it is people driven, how couldn’t it be for anyone? Technology needs to be a mean of inclusion by gender, race, age, disability, sexual orientation, personality type or any other group of characteristics that can make us unique.

This flexibility is also allowed considering technology is a very broad subject. You don’t need to code to be part of the phenomenon. Technology is everywhere and if we take the techie definition in a literal interpretation, anyone that knows a bunch of smartphone hacks or talks to Siri can be considered a techie.

Technology changes our lives everyday because technology is already part of our lives. Let’s not limit it -or ourselves- by being attached to titles. There is room for everyone.