Over coffee this morning just thinking back to my days at Teleport Internet Services (and before, Fibernet) and can’t help realize that I’ve always been a developer. I’ve always been creating value for the team or organization or myself by making shit that was needed and practical. I have a Russian degree, not a CS degree. I did do one semester of CS and realized that I could easily do that, but really did not want to. They weren’t fucking doing anything! All they were doing is playing around with their bubble sorts. The action was in the Language and Linguistics Lab were people every day were creating real applications that had actual value for the people using those applications. Developing that language software was far more important to me than anything happening in the entire CS department, and frankly always has been. The root of the word application is “to apply”. Why the fuck are we learning any of this if not “to apply” it to something practical!?
So I’m not disappointed that I don’t have a CS degree. I’m fucking proud of the fact that I don’t. I’ve implemented complex data structures and algorithms when I needed to apply them (for PEGN, for example) but never before. My role has always been to respond to the “Hey, could you build a thing that does this and such?” I’m fucking awesome at that and always have been. I feel like what might come off as arrogance might eventually inspire someone to realize that you are not “less than” for building applications that meet needs of humans using the computers. You are actually “greater than” all the blow-hard, pedantic assholes who look down on you for not being able to write CS proofs and describe the difference between finite automata and PEG’s infinite lookahead approaches to lexing data streams (although that does make PEG awesome, and all the old school compiler-think outdated and irrelevant for most applications, which I why I fucking love Brian Ford, another practical guy).