Plumbing Problems
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I focused all of my efforts on the computer for the rest of college. When 9/11 happened it felt like capitalism was collapsing just as I had expected. But it didn’t change my views about activism.
The government overreach that came afterwards made protesting seem even more ineffectual than before. I needed to focus on becoming a great programmer. If civilization collapsed before I did, then I would just have to deal with that.
My first big programming projects were in lisp. My professor had me working on a system that would allow for sql-like queries over diagrams. It was a pretty interesting project. But the problem wasn’t the problem. The problem was that the sql apis which were accessible from lisp could not accommodate image data. So I had to spend my summer overcoming that hurdle and never got to do very much with the data.
As I got more into programming I found myself often stuck on plumbing problems. Getting data from one format, system or language into another. Building routines to perform seemingly generic and simple operations.
I had been expecting power over data. I wanted programming to yield a sort of virtuosic ability to access and manipulate information in all kinds of ways. But this was not the case.
A typical programming situation would involve a client trying to do something mundane, like store an image in a database. This would turn into a lengthy and arduous effort on my part. The end result would be that the customer would have the ability to do a simple, mundane thing.
I had thought these capabilities would accumulate in some way. And they did, but it was the wrong way. For example, when I had to do images in a database in java it was easier because of the prior experience doing the same thing in lisp. But I would never end up with one system combining all of the capabilities I needed to do everything I wanted.
I began to see that my goals in programming were different from other programmers, just like my goals in activism had been different from other activists. I wanted control over the data. But other programmers were happy to solve plumbing problems on behalf of their clients. For me, one goal was the reason I was a programmer and the other was a job. They were two different things.
At the same time I was making progress. It was deepening my skills and I was really good at solving these plumbing problems. Not only that, but my skills were suddenly being demanded and celebrated in a way that I had never experienced.
Like, with money.
