It started with necessity. Doesn’t everything?
I’ve been working in publishing ever since I moved to the NYC area 13 years ago. My particular corner of the industry – educational publishing – has transitioned to the digital age more gradually than the industry as a whole. Many of my colleagues still remember the days of making last-minute changes to the hot-wax proofs at the printer. Our process these days is all computer-driven, of course – manuscripts in Word, layouts in InDesign, zipped page-proofs transferred via FTP to our compositors in India – but the product is still print: words on paper, bound in 32-page signatures.
But that’s the old world. As the small, aging company I worked for started receiving fewer and fewer contracts due to our lack of experience in digital production, I found myself back in the job market for the first time in nearly a decade. My particular specialty – Project Management – is arguably more transferrable across fields than some (at the end of the day, it all comes down to effectively juggling resources against the competing demands of quality and speed). Still, it was a bit sobering to see how integral software development and digital delivery has become to every aspect of the publishing world. I suddenly understood the plight of all those laid-off factory workers I remember seeing on TV news shows in the early 90s, thrust into a job market where their skills had become obsolete – or at least, out of date. My situation may have been less dire than theirs, but one thing was clear – it was time to upgrade my skillset.
My initial thought was to simply “get my feet wet” in the basics of coding – take a couple free online tutorials to learn the fundamentals of a few programming languages, enough to be able to speak intelligently on the subject with software developers. As I’ve said, the bedrock skill of Project Management – management – is platform-agnostic, and I figured that as long as I had a basic understanding of the process I was coordinating, there was no need to delve into the nitty-gritty of how to do it myself. So I signed up for an account on Codecademy, with the goal of spending two or three weeks – a month at most – sampling a few popular languages. What I didn’t anticipate was how utterly absorbed in that world I would become.
I’d never thought of myself as a “computer guy.” True, as one of the youngest employees at my company, co-workers would often turn to me to get them out of technical impasses on their computers. And I was pretty good at it, too. But my expertise amounted to nothing more than simple trial-and-error problem solving, along with the perennial go-to of “just try shutting down and rebooting.” Real problems I referred to my younger brother out in California, whose eyes I’d swear I could hear rolling over the phone as he recited the simple three-character command that resolved my “intractable” dilemma.
So I started my coding explorations with the assumption that I’d never actually be good at it. Or more precisely, that I wouldn’t have the patience or inclination to really understand it. But to my surprise, I didn’t just enjoy learning code – I became obsessed with it. I’d find myself logging on first thing in the morning and working straight through past sundown. I’d get stuck on a particular method or function and take a break, then find my subconscious working through a solution while I was buying groceries down the block. I started reading about the fundamental processes of computer operations – Daniel Hillis’s The Pattern on the Stone is a particularly good read on this subject – and became awed by how our entire modern world was built from simple binary circuits and and/or/invert logic blocks, and how these simple rules are almost perfectly analogous to the workings of the human mind. My two to three weeks turned into the three months, and at some point I realized that I not only could do this – I actually wanted to do this.
That’s how it started – with a necessity that became a passion. Can’t wait to see where it leads from here.