This is a keynote from Pycon 2015. I was wondering if those of us here are guilty of writing people off because they do not conform to the “Developer” stereotype we already carry around. Please learn and enjoy!
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Thanks for sharing this.
This talk really nails down the two perspectives of programmers (sucks / rocks) I tend to have. Not consciously, mind you, but analyzing my inner thoughts reveal this bias somewhere in my internal wiring.
The first time I really felt qualified to be doing what I do is when I worked with a couple of agencies and saw the quality of code they paid people to produce. I was stunned! I feel like I know nothing about computers and programming, yet here I am staring at the work of someone who clearly knows less, yet probably has a much more impressive resume and portfolio than I.
I remember being hired to build a SPA for an African music startup. I built a REST-like API (it wasn’t REST but it did the job perfectly well), started working on a JavaScript framework for the SPA that did very clever caching on the client (cached song metadata on the client and playlists just sent over song ids … framework calculated what songs weren’t in the cache and bundled them into one request to the API) and made playlists embeddable on other sites. All without jQuery or any framework. I think the biggest library I used was SoundManager2, for playing and managing audio.
You wouldn’t believe it but I never felt average, let alone like an expert, working on this. I was always drowning in how much I didn’t know about PHP or Javascript and what I needed to learn to make things happen.
Average developers do awesome things. They just don’t appreciate it because they know they are average.
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