i'm just having fun
149 points by FedericoSchonborn
149 points by FedericoSchonborn
Related: You can have fun while also feeling your work is important, too.
This is a personal aside, not a message to the blog author.
This is going to turn into a bit of a personal monologue. I'm sorry.
When I was learning to program as a middle-schooler, my parents would always yell at me to "stop playing on the computer" (ended up becoming my career with a skill headstart). When I started my VC-backed company, my wife's family would say "oh he's playing office again" when I'd go to SF for "work" (company exited at multi-billions). When I started a game-related side project, friends would say "oh it's just burnout therapy" (it was, but I also ended up selling it for mid-6-figs). And now I'm working on a terminal and repeatedly hear about it just being an unimportant toy (you can find examples even on this website of this). (Note: I used financial outcomes as impact justification but I don't think its that important, its just a common way to communicate it to people, for better and worse)
I have a perpetual chip on my shoulder because I'm also in the camp of doing things primarily motivated by having fun, but people in and out of my life repeatedly not taking it seriously. You can have fun and also consider your work serious (or, have it actually be serious by various metrics).
"Perpetual chip on my shoulder" is probably too dramatic. It definitely caused me some serious frustration and angst early in my career, but I was able to learn to morph that energy into motivation and drive, a constant need to prove myself. That led to its own unhealthy ends (negative impacts on personal life), and I've seen therapists about it to better understand and manage this.
When I read this blog post, I was nodding the whole time, really happy for this person. At the same time, I could feel that their fun was important to them (how important, I don't know, and maybe I'm projecting myself, but it felt important to them). And so I just want to say that I'm glad you're having fun, and I'm glad you're working on the things that you want to work on, and they're impacting people and serious nonetheless. So, thank you, I see you.
Mitchell,
i’m the author of the blog. thank you for sharing your story. i do feel very seen. it was something similar for me, in high school my dad kept telling me to get off the damn computer. i remember telling him very seriously that i wanted this to be my career and he eased up a bit after that.
i think there’s this belief, in American society at least, that jobs have to suck, that if you enjoy it it’s not a “real” job. i think this is one of the reasons teachers and artists are often treated so poorly. certainly when i tell my family that i like my work and that i don’t have to work that many hours, they’re kind of in disbelief that jobs like this exist.
the workaholism is something i struggle with too, something my whole family struggles with. i think that’s one of the reasons i take my fun so seriously! i feel much better about myself if i'm playing and making art, even if it’s still programming on the computer, than if i were dead serious all the time.
i see a lot of the writing i do, especially, as something that’s both fun and serious, something that changes how people think about computers but comes out of a joy at just how much is possible to create in this wild world of computers we’ve all built together.
anyway, i’ve rambled enough ^^ thank you again.
Thank you for writing this. As with all forms of art, it's difficult to tell what the impact will be on others.
Here in the UK I've primarily witnessed overlaps with that American philosophy as cultural homogeneity - namely, "If I suffer we should all suffer."
I've been through considerable angst from this. "Why are you having fun" is a question I have been asked before, and often times I don't see the point in letting insecurities bubble in those cases. Far more often than not, letting yourself indulge in the joy that is learning - especially around topics involving computers - doesn't need a reason!
I've lurked on this site for a considerable amount of time, and I'm sure there are countless others that do the same. I can say for certain that articles such as yours have had a positive impact on my life!
Not directly relevant to the overall discussion, but since you're here: I never understood the "hate" Ghostty gets as an "unimportant toy". From my standpoint, you're living the dream. I've always said if I could retire early, I'd just work on open source.
I know that you know you're doing good work, but I hope it helps to hear it from others.
I think a lot of it stems from either envy or misunderstanding. Envy that the critic is not also able to devote such time and resources to a passion project, or misunderstanding that this project has to meet certain viability criteria to be worth while. That criteria generally aligning with "What is the path to profit?". The fact that Ghostty is high quality and popular means people are talking about it a lot, and so we see it a lot - but relatively I'm sure it's a similar percentage of people that "don't see the point" of any other project that doesn't generate an income.
It's pretty horrid to downplay the importance of people's fun in the way those people in your life did. Fun is the stuff that we choose to do, in a way that work often isn't. It's almost always a reflection of our desires as people. I know a lot of people who are very serious about their fun (in the sense that they're dedicated to it; many of them bring a lot of whimsy and joy to their fun as well). Dismissing someone's fun seems to me to be dangerously close to dismissing them as a person.
Also, Ghostty is really nice.
Not to take away from the advice, but some people really are better than others at computers (or anything else).
Programming is one of my fortes, and I am having fun with it too. I build my own tools, I like to fuck around and I definitely learned a lot that way. But I still encounter people who are "better" at my thing on a daily basis, even after doing it for two decades. The internet has a way of surfacing them. What else could I expect? There are millions of developers. There is bound to be one or two (or ten thousand) (or a million) that have more talent than I have.
And that is OK, I enjoy reading their posts, I am still having fun and I am still learning. That is supposed to be the thing that satisfies you. Not the expectation that if you do all that, you will be as good and as respected at X as the person you are jealous of now. There will always be someone smarter than you. It doesn't matter, if you had fun fucking around yourself.
Even with some variance in people's ability to understand or apply some concepts, people are better at the things they are interested in. One might have some natural affinity with music, but you won't become a musician without thousands of hours of practice. There are very few Mozarts, and even him came from a family of musicians that helped him capitalize on his affinity from a young age. So, sure, I remember being in college and reading about this teen who had reverse engineered DirectX10 to run on XP and think "what am I doing, clearly I'm a noob and it's too late for me". I will likely never be someone "notable", but you know what? That's fine. I'm just over here doing my thing. I never was seeking notability, but once I stopped comparing myself with others and just focused on enjoying what I enjoyed, my expertise grew on its own, almost without trying. Being in the top 0.5% of any activity you need grit, time, affinity and even luck. Being in the top 10% you only need to have interest and the space and time to seek it out.
I stopped comparing myself to others when I started to ask myself "these people are better than me at this thing I wish to be good at, but would I want their lives?". Pretty much to be great at something you need to devote vast amounts of time to it, even with natural talent. That leaves out less time to other interests and, especially, family.
Plus I just have too many things I'm interested in. There's a great saying by chess grandmaster Morphy: "The ability to play chess is the sign of a gentleman. The ability to play chess well is the sign of a wasted life."
people are better at the things they are interested in.
+1 to this. I studied Math at the University and for a period I tutored some high schoolers who had bad grades. By the end of the year they would thrive. I think most people don't understand Math because they don't like it (and usually teachers/professors do a really bad job of enticing students to learn it). All of the people I tutored understood with ease once I was able to spark their interest. The rest was practice (a lot of practice!) that they embraced more easily once they found it kind of fun.
but some people really are better than others at computers
I think it's just certain aspects they're better at, but may be worse than you in something else.
"Being good with computers" is such a wide net, it's easy to compare yourself in some specific area only and apply that perceived comparison to whole "computer" area.
I think it's just certain aspects they're better at, but may be worse than you in something else.
And this is amazing, as breadth of knowledge matters a lot, and thanks to the combinatorial effect, it’s relatively easy to get a unique niche. Consider three skills A, B, and C. There can be plenty of people who are great at each one individually, but once you start looking for someone who’s proficient in all three, and all of sudden you might have very few choices.
I think it's just certain aspects they're better at, but may be worse than you in something else.
While I think that is definitely true, a quick search shows that there are an estimated 20 to 50 million software developers worldwide. With those numbers, no matter how you put it, there are many others that are better than you at whatever set of skills you care to define. And that is fine.
With the number of variations around software you are also better than millions at some specific skill.
In middle school, I had a friend who was much better at computers than I was, and I was much better at Math. This was part of the reason I focused pretty much entirely on Math in college, and didn't take a single CS course.
Eventually, I got to the rest of the world, and found out I'm much better with computers than most people. It turned out my friend is perhaps around 99.99th percentile, with pretty crazy achievements to match. If I'd had more objective data, I might have started programming earlier. (Or I might not have – the only CS courses near me taught Java, and I didn't really fall in love with programming until I found lisp.)
Person that knows, say, 20% more than you about X interacts with you in the context of a conversation about X
Monkey statistics brain kicks in and starts extrapolating: "if they know 20% more than me about X, maybe they know 20% more than me about Y and Z too"
Paranoia, feelings of inadequacy, sense of personal failing
All the while, you forget that the very reason they chimed in to begin with is specifically because they are one of the very rare people that know 20% more about X.
That 'great filter' also means that your monkey brain extrapolation was entirely wrong to begin with, because people almost never sit very far to the right of every normal distribution at once.
They've already spent their skillpoints on X knowledge, and are trading it off against Y and Z knowledge.
There are some skills that are generally useful, of course, and those are the ones that are worth putting more time into learning, but don't mistake broad intuition for deep knowledge.
"Talent" is absolutely not real. It's little more than a way to justify favoritism in the sphere of education. Computer does not require this made up abstract intangible "talent", it requires diligence and curiosity, which are both learned, and have little to do with any "natural gift".
People's abilities definitely differ. Isn't that what talents are? 🤔 like the intersection between natural abilities (heritable traits), interest, and practice? Idk what traits exactly help make someone especially good at programming, but things like eideic memory, ND pattern matching, &c. are not uniformly distributed, but do lend themselves to analytical tasks.
The term is derived from the Parable of the Talents, where it essentially is taken to mean God-given, or natural gifts, which we may squander or use.
Talent is thus not broadly used in English to refer to things which are learned but is used to refer to the natural ability of a person to learn them, in a naturally determined way, and has been applied in all kinds of bigoted ways to gatekeep education from those who are considered to not have such 'gifts'.
Hmm. Well I do get where you're coming from, but idk if that means that natural abilities don't exist. Gatekeeping like that definitely isn't compatible with an egalitarian/socialist society. Do you think the traits that are commonly called talent would disappear if such gatekeeping was no longer practiced?
Personally, I don't really worry about that, if only because I'm not in the business of constructing hypothetical societies (although I'm always available to be hired to be your local regime bureaucrat). I currently teach children to code and not once in my experience has any of the kids I've instructed shown they don't have the gift to learn to program and excel at it; the only gift truly required is determination and a personal computer. Talent just isn't a useful framework for education, and in the industry it is just applied to index into the quality of one's education.
hm, i have conflicting feelings about this. i don't dispute that education plays a big role, and that there's a ton of classism and discrimination going on in the industry. but i don't think an education framing can explain why most of the best programmers i know are self-taught, or learned most of what they know informally in community spaces.
i really do think some people are just better at this—but the differentiation comes at a higher skill level, the difference between a good programmer and a great one. i do think that most people can be good programmers with education and determination.
Nobody is magically better at programming. They are given a better or worse environment and emotional/mental tools to learn it, and generally excel based on those, which can always change over time. There really isn't anything genetically/naturally special about it, gifted to us at birth.
i still don't see how this explains highly skilled self-taught programmers tbh. they don't have better emotional regulation than the other people i know, kinda the opposite usually lol.
anyway, i really appreciate the work you are doing to teach programming!
I appreciate your appreciation!
I don't think that emotional regulation is the emotional tool for programming, (although better emotional regulation will absolutely help you program better, given most code doesn't exist in a vacuum away from other people), but I think the greatest emotional tool is the ability to say that you can. A lack of self-confidence is, in my opinion, one of the greatest impediments to peoples' ability to learn programming or any other formal discipline for that matter. It's actually one of the strongest reasons I have an issue with the concept of talent in the context of Computer. If you don't believe you have the "talent" to do it, you are automatically discouraged from dedicating yourself, believing that you can.
Nobody appealed to magic. Your use of it here seems like a strawman to me.
I never said anyone appealed to magic.
Your phrase “nobody is magically better at programming” implies that the person you're responding to said some people are better at programming than others and that their stated or implied causal explanation for this is somehow magical.
(I think the above is sufficient, but to expand a little with the rest of my comment having slightly less confidence than the above short paragraph:)
There are multiple definitions of that word I know of and use, but whichever one you mean, no one appealed to any of them. That said, I assume the one you mean is something like, ‘without some cause to explain it’, which is why you appeal to environmental factors.
You then say:
There really isn't anything genetically/naturally special about it, gifted to us at birth.
which I read as you essentially dismissing genetic or other heritable explanations as “magical” because genetics or brains or minds (at birth?) don't directly encode for (anything we could operationalise as) ‘programming ability’, so there's a lack of causal explanation due to the lack of a direct link between genetics and ‘programming ability’.
In essence, you're dismissing ‘genes’ as not truly being an explanation, and thus an appeal to magic (under the definition I inferred above). In other words, the heritability crowd are saying something like, ‘some people are born better at programming due to genetic( factor)s’, and you think that's just magic, because ‘genetics’ isn't actually an explanation in this sentence but rather a buzzword.
Thus, you hear “born better”, and you think it's a claim of someone being better w/o an explanation — i.e. being magically better — because you've ruled out heritable factors and your mind only considers environmental factors that aren't present pre-birth.
Am I way off or just a little?
Anything I put on this forum needs to be written in some kind of formal language or else this ends up happening lmfao
Anything I put on this forum needs to be written in some kind of formal language
If you told me you didn't mean to imply that, I'd believe you.
You unconsciously used a bit of rhetorical flourish, and that's normal. I do it. We all do it in normal speech. But I'm sorry, I don't think it's fair to dismiss my criticism by saying, ‘you're taking me too much at face value, I didn't mean it like that’.
Rhetoric has impact — in this case, to mentally dismiss or handwave away and associate the opposition w/ unreasonableness — and we should be clear in our argumentation.
I'm not gonna say rhetoric has no place, but too often, it's a way to smuggle things in under the defence of, ‘it's just a bit of rhetoric’.
or else this ends up happening lmfao
If that's so, I'm glad lobste.rs commenters are holding us to higher standards of disagreement.
Pedantry is not a standard of disagreement.
Yes, I understand you think I'm being pedantic. I explained why I think it's not me being pedantic but you being careless with your words.
We don't have to agree, but let's not go in circles.
It just seems like there's a difference between people having differing abilities (talents literally do not exist, every person has exactly identical aptitudes and abilities) and people using the differences between people as a way to control them (talents are some wierd Christian thing).
I'm not making any claims about the utility of talents as an educational framework. Maybe I missed some context, but your anecdote still has me thinking that you're directing your frustration with shitty people at a concept of "natural ability" or "talent" instead of the people who are literally doing the gatekeeping.
"Talent" is absolutely not real
People had this same misconception about the "10x engineers" as well. Just because you've never seen a talent (or "10x engineer", etc.) or you haven't acknowledged it doesn't mean it doesn't exist.
I suspect this is a coping mechanism. People don't want to acknowledge that, yes, this person is 10x more productive than me, smarter than me etc. because it makes people uncomfortable.
I will use your response purely as an example for illustrative purposes: You are not responding to what I said ('talent'/natural ability does not exist as much more than a subjective index into how people receive the education they are given), but to what you imagined that I said (nobody is better than anybody else at computer). Your understanding of 'talent' would say that in this case you simply do not have the talent for literacy. I disagree; you misread what I said, and you like myself or anybody else, could through practice improve your ability to understand the things that you read. Now, apply the same understanding to the development of abilities in using computers.
Why should computers be different than any other creative endeavor in that regard, though?
Few people would make the claim that, say, everyone can be trained to compose music on par with Mozart's if only they're willing to put in the effort. Hundreds of years' worth of diligent, curious composers have spent lifetimes trying, and nearly all failed to measure up.
Ditto with painting, or poetry, or sculpture, or screenwriting: nearly anyone can put in effort and reach high levels of competence, but most people never reach excellence no matter how diligent they are.
You're right, they're not that different, and accordingly I don't believe in natural talent in art either. It's essentially a eugenicist notion that completely annihilates all real conditions for an artist's success or failure in lieu of a reactionary fantasy. So it certainly would be an absurd stance for me to believe in natural talent in art while saying there is no such thing as natural talent in programming.
I don't think it can take away if it's in the post! (in the poster at the end)
- I will not compare myself with my colleagues. If they do computer beautifully, I will enjoy it and be thankful and proud that I live in fellowship with them.
- There will always be someone with more abilities in computer than my own as there will be those with less.
The article discourages this kind of comparison. To say “more talent than I have” is to either mentally confine one’s self to some preconceived notion of mediocrity or to create an impossible expectation to become someone else. Everyone is on a different path. Our collective obsession with prodigies doesn’t really help anyone make progress on their path. A more constructive way to look at the accomplishments of others—especially with computing because it’s so easy to become discouraged—is to ask, “What do I find so amazing about what they accomplished? How did they get there? How can I use this inspiration to motivate me on my own path? What of their practices can I incorporate into my own?”
Sometimes the uncomfortable answer is, “Wow, look at all the shit they went through to get there. I’m not interested enough in this subject to overcome those obstacles.” That’s where the author’s “rid yourself” list comes in. To rid one’s self of achieving someone else’s status is to make room for enjoying computing on one’s own terms. Comparing paths instead of innate talent is also more constructive and less limiting the context of interviewing and hiring. A team is on a journey together, trying to get from X to Y. Is the candidate’s path compatible with the team’s? Framing decisions this way makes it easier to politely decline with sincere good wishes for the other party.
I think it's perhaps better to leave these sort of statements to pedagogical researchers. The famous example is László Polgár who raised his daughters to be the best and second best at the world in chess, with the aim of proving "geniuses are made, not born". By all means he succeeded and this lends some credence to people not being inately better or worse at things.
What if his neighbor had tried the same with his two daughters? Then at least two children would have been disappointed.
Now people are arguing whether or not talent is real, or if one can be the very best at some special thing. My point is that one should stop caring about that. It is the fun along the way that counts, not whether you end up on top or not.
some people really are better than others at computers
One of the interesting things is to observe my kids and their relationship with their digital devices. When I was 6-8, I was the person at home who would setup the television, VCR, and all the digital clocks in the house.
Lots of reasons how and why that came to be, but I don't see that in my kids right now (probably also because those same reasons now are absent).