No Coding, but No Code!
I truly enjoyed coding when I first graduated college. In my final year at Brown, pranks had really taken off in the computer lab and my bestie and I were thrilled by the development. We were also prime drivers of the development. Pablo was interested in musical notation and wrote a LilyPond converter for MIDI in whatever programming language fascinated him at the time, as he was wont to do. The script would play MIDI versions of popular songs all across the lab at inopportune times. Super Mario Bros. Theme was the most common but I think we tried for others too. It was beloved until it got annoying, Brendan narced on us and the beep command was removed from all the machines. In his defense, he did request that only Pablo and I have execute permission on the beep file. The authorities of the Brown computer science department, though, didn’t have the patience for fine-grained rules.
My first few years at Google too were filled with quite a few thrilling moments as I brought a system to life or sifted out meaningful insights from the user logs, though not as much pranking. Corporate environments don’t take too kindly to that type of thing.
I do want to write about Coding at Google, because I have Opinions about it, but I don’t think I’m there yet. As of right now, I do not love coding. I feel medium to powerful revulsion if I look at code, and I can’t tell you why. Overwork? Boredom? It doesn’t matter. I do it because I have to, but I kind of loathe having to do it. It sucks to kinda hate something you used to love. I thought time apart from it would help, and it somewhat has. I don’t feel as much of a “Yuck” reaction. Some of it has to do with how disembodied coding is for me - I lose complete sight of what is good for my body and my eyes and my mind. Getting lost in the problem is enjoyable when you’re younger and only have linear progress to make. When you’re older, you can’t afford the body hit as much, you snap out of it thinking did I just spend 7 hours on a misplaced fucking quote. You also start to loathe linearities of all sort once they disappear from your life.
Long story short, I haven’t been coding for myself. I took on some contract jobs, I coded a bit for my startup, but personal projects - nothing. I haven’t had the desire either - much stronger desire to write human statements that can be misinterpreted by humans for a change.
The desire to create stuff remains, and it’s been easier than ever to avoid coding. No Code tools have been popping up everywhere and they’ve gotten scary easy to use. My buddy over at AirTable would love to sit you down and tell you all you can do with the very advanced spreadsheets AirTables they’ve got over there. Want to build a chatbot? There are like ten platforms for you to do that without learning any code. I am truly blown away by the level of sophistication in tools like Bubble.is. Even this site took a minimal amount of code to write - perhaps 2 or 3 lines. Most of the structure of it is copied from the internet and I could have easily made this much lighter on myself by using the GitHub hosting instead of my own personal hosting.
Given how easy it is to do the first 20-30% of creative stuff on the internet now without code, it might be quite some time until I get coding again. I feel OK about that. I expect I might get itchy in a few months after I write a lot of human words and want to see the heartless, familiar glint of a semicolon on my screen once again;;