the origin story
Consider this set of ramblings a work in progress. Human memory is notoriously bad, so I’ve corroborated many of these anecdotes with the parental unit.
I created this blog to have a place to write without taking myself too seriously. I make jokes about everything, including things I love. Please, don’t take it personally if a quip or joke is about something you love. I promise, it’s all in good fun :~)
the first encounter
I came across the mystic art of programming when I was eight years old. As a kiddo who was just learning about the internet, I was fascinated by the cool and crazy features people built into their webpages. Naturally, I had to have my own! I spent countless hours reading through books, watching YouTube videos, chugging through W3Schools, and smashing my head against the keyboard. Powering through the frustrations and roadblocks, I produced a glorious HTML document containing a massive list of various airplanes and their specifications, a stunning lime green background, and red text everywhere.
Unfortunately the airplane site was never published, since I knew fuckall about that part of the internet; but for little me, it sparked a lifelong passion for building things with text on a screen.
I never really improved my HTML and CSS skills much after this point, which is why you get to see the beautifully mis-aligned icons I tried to add!
the pivot
Young me was full of pride. I showed off my awesome website to anyone who’d listen. One such person was a friend of the family who happened to be a computer engineer. I was beyond excited to share my new skills with this person, but unlike the other adults in my life, he was not impressed at all! In an annoyed tone, he uttered “HTML is not real programming, you should learn Assembly,” a phrase which lives rent-free in my head to this very day.
I was upset. How could he ignore all my effort and just discount everything I had learned! Being the spiteful little shit I was, I vowed to become the greatest at this ‘assembly’ thing, show off to that mean family friend, ?????, and profit.
In hindsight, he was likely just looking out for me, and thank goodness for that. I mean seriously, I thought HTML was a real programming language! It’s like saying “Electron doesn’t chew through memory,” or that “SQL makes great game engines.”