A Little Background
Thursday, March 03, 2005
I started programming when I was about five or six years old.
People sometimes think I'm bragging when they hear me say that, or like on Tuesday morning when it came up in a meeting, they give a surprised laugh and wonder how something like that could come about. It's neither bragging nor especially weird, it's just a little insight into who I am. When it came up earlier this week, we were looking over some work from my portfolio and they seemed to be trying to reconcile the work they were seeing with the fact that it was from someone "self-taught", a label that just seems so dirty to me for some reason. You'd never want a heart transplant from a self-taught surgeon and neither would I, so I prefer "autodidact" and that seems to help me sleep at night. I'm comfortable enough around computers that I created my career as a web designer because of the fact that I'm an autodidact, not in spite of it. I was trying to explain that this was perfectly normal, that I didn't need a college degree to do what I do and we all just learn on the job anyway. In fact, the only programming courses I've taken since high school were the ones I took at UCSD because they were easy A's and one of the best Java programmers I've ever met was also a UCSD political science alum like me.
And let me clarify - I don't necessarily consider myself a programmer now, since it depends very much on who I'm talking to. If I'm hanging out with Jude and the rest of the guys from my old job back at UCSD's Biology Computing Services, who drink steaming hot Java and SQL everyday, then I'm not one in that strict traditional sense, someone who'll build your custom accounting and payroll systems. They're the type of guys that love to elucidate why server-side scripting and client-side Javascript and Actionscript aren't real programming languages. Something about compiling and data types. Yeah, go talk to them, my eyes glaze over too.
When I think about how young I got started, it's something I consider a bit personal and embarrassing sometimes, but most of the time I don't feel anything; it's just how it was. A high school friend of mine talked about his father in similar terms - he was so young when his dad died and his mother and three older brothers did such a good job looking out for him that he never knew what it was like to be raised otherwise, it's just the way things were.
I started at about the same age that I also graduated from kicking a soccer ball around with my mom at picnics to playing on a real team. That doesn't feel weird either - I just happened to be raised around soccer and computers and children are sponges, so there you go. Nobody ever seems to get weirded out about the soccer though, as if getting worked up about kicking a ball around was any more sane or ultimately useful. I still love soccer but whenever I stop to think about it, it makes about as much sense as spotting trains.
The first computer I had was a Texas Instruments console that I plugged into the TV, just like a Nintendo, which I wasn't allowed to have. The TI was okay in the eyes of my parents because it was educational, with clunky cartridges filled with math games where you had to solve problems as they fell down the screen before they hit the ground and exploded. More importantly, you could program the thing. With a real programming language, BASIC. High-level, but real.
Don't get me wrong, I didn't write any programs that drew fractal patterns or solved problems that stumped eccentric physicists with strange hair. They were about as complicated as you'd expect a first grader's creation in any medium to be, about as good as their drawing or singing, which is to say not very. I wrote one that flashed "Go Team Go" repeatedly, for example. But like any other endeavor at that age, you're judged by how well you're not expected to perform as a little being of elfin height and therefore the "Go Team Go" program was good enough to show off at school for show and tell. Lugging that big machine into class, taking time before the presentation to hook up the cables to the TV on the big black rolling A/V rack that every American grade schooler can identify at a hundred paces, explaining what my computer and the program was to the class before the bell rang and they ran home - I still remember how important and happy I felt.
What's noteworthy is how your present experiences and identity wash your memories until they fit how you think things happened. I think of myself now as a very literary and articulate person, overly good at English (stuffily verbose really (some might tire of my working John Stuart Mill into lunchtime conversation (pretentious nested asides like this don't help either))) and constantly working on my Turkish to keep it as fluent as I can be. I definitely don't think of myself as a shy wallflower, anything but. Yet back then, I was. I spoke Turkish and was still learning English, my second language that I just picked up a few years before. I probably even had an accent. I was the new kid at school, transferred in sometime in the year and not really in any particular group. I even liked to sing, bold enough to audition for some kind of school choir. All of those things are such a huge divergence from who I now think of myself as, alien characteristics that I've unconsciously identified as "not me" for so long now that it's hard to remember being otherwise, especially not as the exact opposite.
It's almost sad to think about what a bookworm and technophile I was for my age. Sure, okay, curiosity is wonderful and those early experiences laid a great foundation for who I am today, but still, I wonder sometimes. I can still remember my rudimentary efforts at creating artificial intelligence to keep me company, although I didn't think of it as AI or a friend substitute. I'd program the computer to answer or ask questions in a certain scripted queue, so I'd type "How are you?" and it would reply, "Just fine, thanks! What about you?" and I'd write back, so on and so forth. I don't remember if I got far enough along to create a choose-your-own-adventure level of complexity, with conversations forking according to the answers. I seem to remember starting to do that in junior high and running out of patience.
There's been strains of myself that I do identify with too, little threads running through my life that I find joy in looking at, like the story that my mother only recent told me that paints me as psychotically friendly, despite the language barrier. When we moved to our new house in Scripps Ranch, she didn't speak English, didn't know anyone in the neighborhood and I was only five, so you can imagine her alarm when I went missing one day very soon after we moved in. Turns out I went halfway around the cul de sac, knocking on each door along the way, introducing myself and asking if they had any kids my age. Apparently I finally struck gold around house 7 and my poor exasperated mother found me there later, happily playing in the back yard with a little girl named Wendy. I was either too new to English or too young to explain where I lived when her mother would ask, so she didn't know what else to do other than to let me go on playing and I was happy to oblige.
So why is it that the warm and familiar feelings of "ah ha, see, I've always been this way" is in such sharp contrast to the surprise and even melancholy in discovering differences in who you thought you were? The excitment of finding familiar personality themes even applies to learning about other people's backgrounds. I lived with my grandmother in Istanbul for a summer about 6-7 years ago and one of my favorite conversations was when she explained how headstrong my mother was as a high school senior, forgoing college after graduation and jumping straight into the workforce instead. And probably rebellious too - my mother's mother pushed her hard to go to a university because her family didn't allow her to go back in her day, despite being one of the smartest in her class, so my mom probably did what any bullheaded teenager does - the opposite of what your parents are trying to cram down your throat. Doesn't matter that she ended up seeing the light decades later and got an art history degree from Mesa. In fact, she's addicted to classes there and is always taking something every semester. Listening to my mom's obstinacy, I felt a sense of kinship knowing that we were alike.
No answers here and I guess I'm not really looking for any, just a few ruminations that felt worth exploring today.