“I’m not a programmer”; it is a common refrain when I try to explain what I do in my technology-based day job. I find it harder and harder to justify the sentiment as over time however due to how much time I spend looking at, changing, and creating code while at work.
Yesterday, I was tinkering with my Github Pages site, which for all intents and purposes works the way I intended it to. But I was bored, so I blew it up, started from scratch. After an hour of playing with new themes and changes I was interested in, I reverted back to the working version with the commit message “because”. In my mind, I was thinking “because this is easier, because this is working, because this is comfortable”, but in the long run I learn nothing from “because”.
And really, that is what all my side projects (and in my mind all my experiences) are about: learning.
Did the Internet community peak at bookmarks? Asked in a different and perhaps more complete way: just as technologies like RSS and email in their purest forms are hard to beat even as technology marches forward, what better technology exists to keep track of information on the ever-expanding Internet than bookmarks? Taken a step further, what better way to share the bookmarked information than a site of your own? As such, I‘ve been reading, which is why I write now.
Working in and having a passion for libraries, I am struck by the fact that the way bookmarks work in the physical world is not directly analogous to bookmarks in the digital world. Bookmarks in the digital world are instead like dog-eared pages or highlighted passages; if you think of the Internet as a single tome, that is. In any case, anything that moves you to deface a book should probably be shared or become immortalized in some other way than just a reference for a future version of yourself.