Greetings present reader,
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a: all while enamored by the endless technology tutorials, raw & insightful career blogs, & spooky-fast load-speeds, I too felt lost & adrift in the diversifying niches of this wonderful platform - dev.to - & the software development world at large.
b. like a crazy person, I continued to revolve in my totally appropriate occupational identity-crisis & self-isolated from the otherwise warm & opportune trans-modern developer world (months prior to any such demands by our State).
c. concurrent to my stumble through the valley of my shadows and ego-death I'd been stomping through real-world projects & live lectures @ The Lambda School, establishing and refining my powers in full stack web-development.
d. once I'd risen to the humble skill-level of apprentice, still now, I am overwhelmed by the ever-differentiating software-development field and convinced to contend with developers trivial yet most basic epistemological open-question: what is programming?
e. I can't seem to get my physical foot off the ground until my metaphysical eyes know where I'm aiming (mere evidence of my self-diagnosed plurality of mental derangements) 🤤.
[para.] the propensity for good-willed men to revel in abstractions & rhetoric inside their head before acting on faith preempts them from learning how to think.
~ David Forest Wallace
so on the faith of our rich repository of epistemological injunctions of the ancient, I selected a model in which to dissect what programming is to me with poignancy and satisfaction.
🌊
a: tat tvam asi means that art thou || you're it. some statements or "speech-acts" are denser than minified JavaScript one-liners, and ancient Sanskrit phrases on the nature of Being, though ostensibly banal & mystical, when examined can offer pervasive insights.
[We] are a function of what the whole universe is doing in the same way that a wave is a function of what the whole ocean is doing.
~ Alan Watts.
b: irrespective of whatever religious & metaphysical affiliations you may subscribe to (be it atheist, christian, etc) we humans have a deep intuition as to the impartial interconnectedness of not only our actions in the World, but the concepts we use to describe and model our actions & beliefs. Some derivatives of concepts become so common they're appended to our shared vernacular as connotation.
Praised among them , "Programming" (when divorced from the product/capitalism-driven & chiefly technical connotation) can be conceived as a virtual extension of consciousness' innate arte of deriving & formalizing meaning from experience.
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a: program (v.) - to arrange according to a plan or schedule.
without resorting to valueless reductionisms, our plain definition can be expanded and specified into myriad inter-disciplines or artes that 'arrange elements into a plan'. one seemingly innocuous example is the beautiful orchestration of supply distribution logistics.
be it big or small business: rank-ordering objectives, defining schema and types, troubleshooting errors, & maintaining/caring for essential sub-components (human resources, machines, etc) all pertain to serving a plan whose concerns are reducible to a few "transcendent values", that the practitioner defines his/her self.
b: specific to computer programming, with the open-source initiative, the jungle of coding camps, & ever-growing developer communities, it seems clear to me the values pertinent to the majority of developers' collective unconscious' are expressing truth, sharing love, & beauty itself.
nothing could be more obvious yet underrated than our individual capacity to expand consciousness by the will of these 3 instincts (especially though the eyes of a compassionate technologist). its apparent this sentiment has been shared yet suppressed all over internet media, and on this platform too!
programming with code is certainly dissolving the line between technical trade-skills, and limitless magic. I believe mastering and practicing such magic fixed towards the collective good comprises our shared passions in this field (certainly evident with the intent and love of this platform), and the only word I've found that encapsulates this concepts is T3chnomancy. - that is,
- a t3chnomanc3r (n.) is one who utilizes and practices technological magic to solve problems, express truth, share love, and beauty for beautys sake.