As I’m in the home stretch of coding school, I’ve started to reflect on what motivates me to learn this stuff.

Being Skilled

I’ve always been a tinkerer. I taught myself HTML and CSS in high school. I was that kid that installed games on my TI-83 calculator. I used to make custom themes for iPods by modifying the firmware with software called iPodWizard.

Tinkering with things provides an immense intellectual satisfaction for me. I love the process. Take it apart. See how it works. Break it. Piece it back together.

Building a project that pull from a public API, or allows a user to sign in with Facebook feels more satisfying. Programming is like a superpower, closer to the cusp of the radically innovative movements of the internet.

Program or Be Programmed

I recently read a great book by Douglas Rushkoff called Program or Be Programmed. In it, he talks of how technology is so swiftly modifying the world we live in. Our manner of interacting with people, with information and with each other is shaped by programs that someone wrote, whether on our phone or computer. He says:

“Technology is fast becoming the boundaries of our perceptual and conceptual apparatus; the edge between our nervous systems and everyone else’s, our understanding of the world and the world itself.”

So by learning to program, I have more of an understanding of the ways software is shaping our perception behind the scenes. When I see a gap there, I now know how to build something to fill it. It isn’t enough to know how to use programs other people wrote. I want to build the programs themselves. He goes on to explain:

“Programming is the sweet spot, the high leverage point in a digital society. If we don’t learn to program, we risk being programmed ourselves.”

The Open Source Web

A huge perk of programming is being able to participate in the beautiful community of Open Source Projects. Philosophically, I love that so many projects are decidedly open source. The code is out in the open, for anyone to read, tinker with and submit modifications to.

This community is moving the internet and humanity forward. Open Source projects are building things that work well and putting it out there to share, instead of keeping it private. If I can program, I can help build this awesome world.

Rushkoff sums this movement up quite well:

“In the long term, if we take up this challenge, we are looking at nothing less than the conscious, collective intervention of human beings in their own evolution.”

That’s what gets me super jazzed about developing software.