Encouragement
“We were lucky enough to grow up in an environment where there was always much encouragement to children to pursue intellectual interests; to investigate whatever aroused curiosity.”
— Orville Wright
“Tell me about your journey” is a question I am frequently asked in job interviews. Initially, I heard the question from prospective employers. Now, more and more, I get this question as I interview potential employees. Every time I try to construct an answer, I find that the beginning of my journey goes back far beyond my first encounter with a computer. Do I remember the first time my kindergarten teacher wheeled the massive computer cart (complete with ungainly CRT, noisy dot-matrix printer, and dual 5" floppy drives) into our classroom? Of course I do! But, that was not the beginning — it was simply a turning point.
The beginning happened earlier, without a microchip in sight. When I was about four years old, my father built his dream garage behind our new home. My father, that garage, and the byproducts of its construction, had an immeasurable impact on who I am today.
First, I watched my father and others construct a building on a bare patch of land. I saw that the act of construction was something that could be accomplished by ordinary people I knew. They were “grown ups”, of course, but they were also my father, my uncles, my neighbors. They were people I knew I could be like someday.
Second, the inevitable bits leftover from such a large project provided me with unlimited opportunities to emulate what I observed. My father saved all the odd cuttings of lumber, too small or irregular to be of use, in the cardboard box from our new washing machine. They were mine, to do as I pleased. To this day, decades later, we still have not used up all the hundreds of various sizes and shapes of nails and screws left over from the construction. Those, and any of Dad’s hand tools, were also available to me. I was free to fashion crude airplanes, toy boats, or anything else I could imagine. (The only parental intervention I can recall involved a highly questionable bicycle ramp, which was probably for the best.)
Third, once the garage was completed, my father built a little work bench just for me, right next to his. My grandfather helped me build a toolbox for my own set of tools. My dad showed me how important, and how fun it was to take things apart, to fix what was broken, to make something new for a purpose.
I was convinced I was going to build a robot. Whether it was comic books, Saturday morning cartoons, or something else entirely, by the time I was eight, I knew I had to build a robot.
Again, Dad didn’t mind the things I hauled out to the garage for disassembly, as long as they were already broken. When Dad needed to make a trip to the local junkyard to keep our car running, he took me along. When I scavenged a car part that would make the perfect “head” for my robot, my father kicked in the extra dollars for me to bring it home.
I never finished my robot, despite an impressive collection of components. Looking back as an adult, the robot I envisioned is just reaching the edge of possibility today, and it was definitely impossible at the time, even for an adult with education and training. My father never told me that, though.
Those moments of encouragement are where my journey began. When I first sat down in front of a computer, I saw immediately that I could make it do things. I could try, and fail, and try again for as long as I wanted. The creation and nearly instantaneous feedback cycle of programming is a high I haven’t stopped chasing.
So much of that feeling is due to my parents’ encouragement to create. It’s because my father made a space for me to create. It’s because he brought me along on his own projects. It’s because he never told me my idea wasn’t going to work.
I first attended That Conference in 2016, and I rediscovered the feeling that led me to my profession. That Conference isn’t like Build or re:Ignite. While there are incredibly skilled industry professionals presenting, it isn’t about the deepest knowledge on a particular framework or tool. That Conference is about getting back to the tinkerer in all of us. It’s about trying out 3D printing or IoT or machine learning. That Conference is about encouraging everyone try something new, not telling people their dream is impossible.
That Conference is unique in that it’s also about family. Every year, there are more events on the family schedule. Little minds learn coding, make circuits with play dough, and interact with robots my eight-year-old self couldn’t have imagined. By involving our children, we show them that coding is something they can do, too, and it’s fun! We show them the joy of trying something new, of creation that embraces failure as a natural process. We show them what just might be the beginning of their journey.
