There are two wolves inside of me. One impressed early upon Sneakers. The other impressed early upon Hackers.
This is not where I expected to find myself at the beginning of the year. I don’t suppose many of us are where we expected to find ourselves from then to now. A month and a half ago I found out that the store I’d worked at for twelve years was finally closing down, owing primarily to recent events. A week before that my mother, who knows whereof she speaks, suggested that if the store closed down I should apply to a coding boot camp. I’d always loved working with and on computers, right? Three weeks ago, very roughly, I started at Flatiron School. And here I am.
Becoming a web developer is an interesting thing for me. My mother’s not wrong, is the funny part. I spent high school lunch periods shoveling food into my mouth and racing with my friends to the computer labs; we were all on BBS’s. I made fan pages for tv shows and books I was into at the time, hideous looking things with starkly patterned backgrounds on HTML v1, I tootled around and joined web rings. I did not commit the offense of marquee tags much. The graphics, on the other hand, were objectively hideous. But they were the best we had at the time, it was early days and we were all gleeful at the possibilities of the radical new technology. This was just before and into the earliest years of the dot com bubble. I wasn’t in a position to witness the September That Never Ended, but I remember hearing about it from those who were.
All of this was in no small part due to my even earlier experience with programming and computer code. In elementary school my grandmother taught us how to program in Logo and LogoWriter, as it was called then. (I have since learned these programs are still active, now known as MediaWorlds.) We had a little cursor called a ‘turtle’ and with the use of a handful of basic commands we could make it move in various directions, draw a line or move without a line, fill in a block bordered by lines or the entire screen. With these simple commands we could even make primitive animations, which we did either for the 1988 or the 1992 Olympics, memory fails on the dates. I do remember there were some excellent trampoline and gymnastics animations in my elementary school class. We also learned BASIC, although that was less interesting to 8 year olds than blinking cursors and making pretty pictures.
So where does that leave me, twenty and thirty years later? As it turns out, going through tech school alternating between incensed frustration and the glee of remembering how if/then/else logic works. My mother suggested I sign up for a coding boot camp and get a job in software development, specifically web development, no doubt because she remembered me cackling in the basement as I sat hunched over the family computer banging out the latest chapter of X-Files fanfiction and formatting it to post to the web. That is definitely the extent of what I want to share about my awkward teenage years, but I did, and she did, and she was right. We can do things these days that teenage me could only dream of being able to do on the web, and the prospect of being a part of that makes my inner fifteen year old very happy.
So, how does this relate to Sneakers, and Hackers, and the two wolves? Well, when I was first coding web pages a good twenty five plus years ago we had 28.8bps modems. The luckiest had T1 lines, at a transmission rate of a whopping 1.5Mbps. Our web pages were static, they conveyed information and occasionally moving pictures in gif or .mov format. Youtube, a quick Google search tells me, wouldn’t exist for over ten years. I learned how to code static pages with HTML and CSS and I learned how to code lean and clean and neat, so that a person on a 14.4 clunker could view them without much difficulty. Zip back to the future and now we have television on the web, we have entire computers built on the premise that you don’t need an operating system, only a web browser. It’s a very different game with much more intense system requirements than my little computer that could. So I needed a new computer.
Being a person who rather recklessly plunges hands-first into learning new skills, I decided to build one from scratch. Other friends in software and web development assured me that it would be easier to upgrade a home built computer, I checked the specs for what I needed, bought parts, and promptly discovered that owing to the gaming industry many of the larger parts inside a computer now… glow. My motherboard glows in rainbow lights. I remember when you needed a soldering iron and pliers to assemble a computer, and it came in your choice of gray or… gray. Green circuit board or black circuit board. We put stickers and spray paint over them, you could get RGB floppy discs out of different colored plastic. Now it’s LEDs and the motherboard comes with stickers and swag. I’m torn between disdaining a computer case that has a window so you can see all the glowing blinkenlights in it and giggling like my fifteen year old self because finally, finally I have a computer worthy of hacking the planet.
So, there are two wolves inside of me, and one is grinning maniacally at getting to put the pretty pictures and fantastic games on the web again, and the other one is somberly looking at the web as it stands today and thinking about the Sneakers quote “It’s about who controls the information. What we see and hear, how we work, what we think… it’s all about the information!”