I'm going to let you in on a little cultural phrase we have in Mexico. Whenever we realise something, we say: "cuando me cae el 20" and that might sound strange; to begin with, it's reflexive: something is falling on you, second it can't be any number, you can't say: "cuando me cae el 18", it needs to be 20 and also you can't use it for like any situation where you realise something. It's not just for like a random fact or an intrusive thought like "now I've come to the realisation after much deliberation and careful thought and by the laws of nature that burritos are sandwiches"; rather something bigger like, you know, a realisation, something that makes you go:
I was X years old when I learned Y!
I guess you'd call it a mind-blowing moment but when it comes from reflection perhaps there isn't a direct translation but by now I guess you know what I'm referring to, you're so very smart 😉. And if you're curious about the "ya me cayó el 20" phrase, it's about big time revealed truths and it comes from back when phone booths on the street would need 20 pesos (old pesos) and so a call could only be made/allowed to continue if you added credit to it. And it somehow became something much more profound... and reflexive as if from the POV of the me phone booth... sigh 😮💨
Ok, so back to when I have one of these moments, whenever "Me cae o me cayó el 20" I kinda look back and my immediate instinct is to think about the time lost, how things would've turned out if I had known, how I would've acted differently and you know the beat of that drum 🥁, I know I do and it sounds like lots of would'ves should'ves could'ves 🎶... But you really can't control these things, in life you live and you learn, no way of knowing everything, right?.... right?!
And I'm kind of dwelling on the touchy subject of most of my truly important realisations; the ones that matter usually end up being... I was wrong, oh boy do I loathe being wrong. It's not my preferred state. And what was I wrong about, well, let me provide some context.
According to some, coding is dead, or done, or something else entirely, what, you ask? well it remains to be seen, so far there is no clear winner. It has changed quite a bit for those of us that have exposure to the new methods of coding. Something about smart assistance? synthetic smartness? something like that and it has changed the landscape and that's like, at this point looking the other way is like denying reality; where it will all lead us? it's uncertain, some predict Skynet, others predict Utopia. Who knows.
And coders, those of us who code but not only that, we also take pride in it. And some people think that coders are not engineers. I disagree. All coders are software engineers. Not all software engineers are coders, just like a friend explained to me recently:
All mini horses are ponies but not all ponies are mini horses 🐴
Coders to me are to software engineers as Ébénistes are to carpenters. All ébénistes are or started as carpenters; they're closer to being artists than carpenters in general. They have taste and skill and aim to create and recreate and imprint wood with art. Not all carpenters do such things nor are they interested in techniques to carve wood into majestic and ornate patterns, classical patterns that resemble nature and other organic creations. Some carpenters are only interested in construction or mass production. Ébénistes tend to be masters of their craft, they tend to communicate emotion. Now of course code is different, there is no audience but I think there is creativity and expression, cleverness, flair... oh come on, let me daydream.
But the practical reality is that we who consider ourselves coders, or aimed to be coders, are, well, to put it bluntly... fffin a predicament. I wanted to be considered a coder because of coming into software from the outside (I'm community-taught). Looking in from the outside, I was amazed and captivated by those who could see the in between: those who could see more than was on screen, those who had Cypher vision, those who saw not the little green characters but something else. They were revered, honestly, they were the lucky ones, or are, which remains to be seen for how long. I'm not trying to make a prediction, if anything I'm in shock and quite saddened, cause I spent at least half of the time I've been in software trying to be part of the club, trying to read between the lines, trying to listen to the music, as Bohr in Oppenheimer would put it:
...the important thing isn't can you read music, it's can you hear it 💥
And I wanted to, I still want to and I do sometimes. I'm always trying to home in on patterns and etiquette, the elegance that a code block can have if you believe code blocks can have elegance. I'm very much into it and I've chased it for a while, maybe for nothing... but that is not the realisation I was babbling about at the beginning, that's just a sad realisation like when I realised that I would do better as a software engineer than as an industrial designer. You are hit with reality like a brick and then you shake it off 🐕 🪇, you do like dogs do and move on, sobbing in silence but you move on. I was wrong about something else.
I was wrong because I felt attacked, I felt unlucky and undeserving of it. I spent so much time on reading not only what is there but what isn't, on understanding, on grasping the elusive, on catching the subtle patterns and the negative space, trying to belong to the club and now the club is gone? Yeah that might be true but also, what I'm wrong and was wrong about is that we, programmers and coders alike, spent so much time doing it to everybody else, automating people out of their jobs. We literally spent our careers trying to capture the world in instructions to scale and optimise EVERYTHING.
And it's not ironic that they came after us (I say they but we came after ourselves), it's just natural. We sat at the edge wondering what was possible, peeking into the other side, only to be the first to be impacted and replaced. It's not unfair, it's not even unexpected. I was wrong to think that sitting at the edges I would be the last to be affected. This wave came in and we were the first to be washed away. It's what we wanted. You don't get to be in tech and ask why me?, you don't get to the frontier in some cases and then wonder why you're hit first. We had it coming, we earned it, maybe we even fostered it. And so now we don't get to say boo hoo, big bad tech is coming for us. We were right there, still are at the vanguard, trying to look ahead and we got and we get to peek and catch glimpses of what's coming but the big part of it is being at the front of the line: you're gonna get hit first.
We can take a minute to mourn and it's valid, anyone can complain even about stuff that was evident to other people, as we're, sadly, almost always the last to know, the last to realise, to understand, to "Caernos el 20" and don't forget to 🐕 🪇.