Why I (Still) Love Tech: In Defense of a Difficult Industry | WIRED

I enjoyed reading this article from Paul Ford reflecting on the "magic" that we sometimes forget, and occasionally misuse, in the technology industry.

And of course I rarely get to build software anymore. . I would like to. Something about the interior life of a computer remains infinitely interesting to me; it’s not romantic, but it is a romance. You flip a bunch of microscopic switches really fast and culture pours out.

The emphasis is mine there. I simply loved that turn of phrase – that culture pours out. How delightful.

And here I squirm and twist. Because—because we have judged you and found you wanting. Because you do not speak with a confident cadence, because you cannot show us how to balance a binary tree on a whiteboard, because you overlabored the difference between UI and UX, because you do not light up in the way that we light up when hearing about some obscure bug, some bad button, the latest bit of outrageousness on Hacker News. Because the things you learned are already, six months later, not exactly what we need. Because the industry is still overlorded by people like me, who were lucky enough to have learned the etiquette early, to even know there was an etiquette.

That is a great way to capture the lack of inclusion in technology culture. it’s completely spot on as well.

A new computer is the blankest of canvases. You can fill it with files. You can make it into a web server. You can send and receive email, design a building, draw a picture, write 1,000 novels. You could have hundreds of users or one. It used to cost tens of thousands of dollars, and now it costs as much as a fancy bottle of wine.

I loved this idea of a computer as a blank canvas as well. Really the entire article is a delight to read. Do yourself a favor and give it a read, particularly if you have always been drawn to computers.