There’s Already a Song About Love

The following “State of Turing” address was delivered to the student body on Monday, November 27, 2017.

A fundamental driver of the human condition is the search for belonging. From birth to death we look for connections to the people, the Earth, the world around us.

Why do we seek the shared experience? Imagine today something amazing happens. Who would you tell? Who would you text? Would you write, talk, sing, dance? And what if today is terrible? Would you reach out in the same ways? To the same people?

When we build connections to the people around us we rarely share just the status. In fact, it’s quite annoying if we skip to the conclusion: “I feel happy” or “I’m heartbroken” — it just begs the question “why?”

Tell me the story — it’s one of our oldest artforms. From great books to the stories shared over a holiday dinner, stories are a reminder of our connections to one another. The same patterns, the same archetypes, but somehow there’s always room for a new interpretation. Like a jazz artist who never plays the same tune twice, there’s always room for one more song about love.

As we seek to build, create, and improve ourselves, our community, and our world, there are the same struggles: hopes realized and hopes dashed, egos built and egos broken.

At Turing, I hope your ego is broken. I want you to find the bottom: the depths of despair where you question your life choices and doubt your potential. Rock bottom usually hits about week three. And there, with your confidence left for dead, you have no choice but to rely on the people around you. I am helpless without you, and you, and you — and you without me.

I believe that building software is like writing a novel, like painting with oils, like constructing with wood. We use the tools at our disposal to bring the fuzzy, abstract, untouchable ideas from our mind into the real world. Why? Our ideas, our visions, our dreams are worth little if they can’t be shared. We use them to build a shared experience.

Unlike most arts, when you make a mistake in programming you tend to find out early, quickly, and loudly. The errors are thrown in your face, then your face is thrown at the keyboard. There’s a dark feeling of failure knowing that you can’t turn the abstract in your mind into the code before your eyes. And then you Google.

As you hit enter on the search there’s a pang of fear. What if I don’t find anything? What if there’s no one out there as dumb, as hopeless as I am? Maybe you find a result from StackOverflow or a GitHub issue, click the link, and hold your breath. Start scrolling down the page with anticipation: please, god, let there be an answer. Please let it make some sense. When you’ve been doing this long enough, you’ll eventually hit one of those pages and realize that your past self either asked or answered the same question before.

That’s what programming looks like: long stretches of failure punctuated by brief moments of success. Every feature is its own chapter and every bug a villain to be crushed. The real joy is not in the finished product, but in the narrative.

Your stories will be lived but will they be told? Our Turing family is now over 700 students and alumni. Up to this point we’ve been far too quiet. We work, and work, and work down here in the basement. We connect with our cohort, a few mentors, and a handful of other students. But the audience out there is much, much larger. And they want to hear from you.

Are you willing to outstretch your hand, your story, to the next person seeking a connection? Maybe it’s a blog post, a technical write up, a GitHub issue, open source contribution, video demo of your work, StackOverflow question, or giving a meetup talk. If we each told one story per week it’d build a library of 36,000 stories per year. Each one of them a chance to connect, a way for someone out there to believe that they’re not alone — that there’s hope.

To tell a story is not to declare expertise or stand high on a pedestal. It’s to remind each other that we’re more similar than different. We have many of the same hopes and dreams. You can tell that story over and over and over because the slightest variation means it’s never the same twice. As people who build careers and lives on the backs of open source and free information, don’t we have a duty to contribute?

Even if it’s been told before we can tell the story again. It’ll always be different.

How dark would the world be without another song about love?

I’m Jeff Casimir, the Executive Director of the Turing School of Software & Design. I believe that great stories can transcend the facts which is very annoying to my significant other.