Most of us, the people for whom the Metaphorical Web makes any sense whatsoever, are geeks. Not so long ago such a term was used with the greatest of derision, an open reference to carnival sideshow geeks - people who were bizarre or did bizarre things. I was a geek, the high school kid that would sit in the computer room (and former storage closet) writing programs on the Apple IIe there while everyone else was at lunch or chilling out during recess. I was the kid that would inevitably be picked at the tail end of whatever sports team match we were mandated to play, because everyone knew I had neither skill nor interest in team sports.
Somewhere along the line, being nerdy gained its fifteen minutes of fame, in large part because one of the most stereotypically nerdy people ever had also managed to become the wealthiest man in the world, and for a while, being the odd man out was in. Then the Technical Nuclear Winter hit, and the football team captains and the marketing types were once again in the driver's seat, laughing at how these stupid tech guys had been taken with stock options that were as empty as vaporware and SCO legal threats.
For the younger kids (and even for many of us who are beginning to see gray in our beards) the viciousness of this turnaround was stunning - going from being able to afford expensive houses to being considered one of the lucky ones if you had parents who could put you up in their spare bedroom proved a powerful blow to a lot of people, shaking them up and making them realize how truly random such wealth could be -- and how duplicitous other people could be, if they thought that they could use greed to control you.
I've been through this cycle a couple of times before - I entered into the programming marketplace in the mid-1980s, when career counselors were advising people not to go into computers, there was no future in it, and again in the multimedia bust of 1994, before the Internet really began to heat up. The tech field's like that ... sometimes you ride the big waves, and sometimes it's better just to take your board out of the water and spend the time waxing and repairing it, because the surf is about as flat as it can be.
Curiously enough, though, the real innovations that occur in the field don't occur when the economy is red-hot and the potential for making money is strongest - in fact that's usually the worst time. Your judgement becomes clouded because you're not asking the question "does this solve a real need?" but rather "can this make me rich?". No, the real breakthroughs come when you're sitting at home, chatting with friends via IRC (IM for you newbies) or email lists, playing with ideas or flaming away the dross, putting together something just to see if it can be done. There's a new toolkit I want to play with, there's an idea I saw that I think could work here as well, we need to figure out where the holes are in this specification, because they're causing real interoperability problems.
A surprising number of programmers are also musicians, though not necessarily world class ones. Part of the music/programming association, I suspect, has to do with the analytical nature of music, but a bigger part is that a musician is in his or her own way also a technician, someone who is interested less in the money than in making their tools do something really cool. The process of innovation has reminded me more than once of an extended jam session, continuous improvisation off a theme. Any musician knows that not all such jam sessions produce great music -- often what they produce is just noise, and the musicians just shake their heads and agree to meet again next week. Sometimes, though, everything clicks, everyone finds themselves in the groove, and before you know it the music ends in the wee hours of the morning with the participants exhausted but happy (and I"m deliberately avoiding another obvious metaphor here).
Lately I find that the meaningful work that I'm doing is not coming from the 9 to 5 grind, the thing that keeps the roof over my family's heads. It comes despite it, in the interstices, through the improvisational conversations that we all seem to be engaged in. There are some profound things shaping up in the software field right now ... things that have occurred not because a CEO somewhere had a grand initiative to add another billion dollars to the bottom line but because, in coffeehouses and pizza parlors and IRC chats and e-mails, people have been playing the music of innovation and inspiration, of trying to build something because it needs to be built, profit be damned.
The cycle is shifting yet again, the momentum building, the ideas exchanged at two in the morning at Starbuks going to make the next BIG THING. No doubt the former jocks and marketing types will begin to circle soon, sensing the potential for making money off these things that they did not create, were not a part of. I suspect they may discover that smart people can be fooled once, but that smart people by definition also learn very, very quickly. Yet I also pity these people, the ones that once reviled us by calling us geeks, for I suspect that deep down they have no music in their souls, that they will never know the real joy of creation.
No code today, though I promise some tasty morsels soon. Until then ... enjoy!
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