Hi! I’ve been thinking about it, why people decide to program? Why do people chose a lonely job? Why do they decide to work every day in front of a screen in an office or at home? Why passing your day solving puzzle after puzzle?

I am a very social person, and sometimes being alone, for long times, in my office makes me feel incredibly sad (I don’t program as a job but I am lucky enough that I have time to study and work on open source software from there sometimes). Yes, it’s good that I am not under a bright hot sun in summer and I am not always fatigued by the harshness of a physically demanding job, but at the same time being lonely so much time with something that requires so much focus have its cons as well.

I have some experience in more physical jobs and, while it was definitely more tiring, it was good to have someone to talk to, for example, and to detatch from your thoughts for a while. You can also procrastinate so much being in front of a PC and finding the skills and tweaks to not do it, especially for someone who was addicted to the internet, is another job by itself.

Deciding to study programming for me (all on my own by reading documentation) was an incredibly hard decision and today it still requires a huge amount of will and strength. I was depressed for years and the cognitive impairment coming from depression (and who knows maybe from genetics) is something I am starting to unwind only now. I believe someone is what it is, but the power of change is always there, and cannot be ignored.

I might have an etremely hard time to study and do it veeery slowly while other people can be at university and pass exam after exam, but I’m also conscious I was starting from nothing, nothing at all. From the pits of years of suicidal depression, sometimes filled with substance abuse.

I will be honest, it was and sometimes still is excruciatingly painful.

Coming out from there was the hardest thing I did in my life and it took years. I still need to work on traumas, and that probably takes most of my energies still today.

I see programming and computers not only as something to focus my (so strong) neurotic energies on, something to help me build my cognitive skills, or a possibly well payed job which I could do from everywhere, but also as something to work on and to improve life for other people.

If you read books like digital minimalism by cal Newport, stolen focus by Johan hari, or program or be programmed by Douglas rushkoff you can understand why software needs to be better and to be for people. I lived it by myself: internet, smartphone and mainstream software is becoming more and more hooking, less and less of an instrument and more and more of a tool to control people. I was addicted for years: a fragile person laying towards the shadow of a world that seemed to fully accept me, while it was using and taking out of me every drop of the little hope and energy i had instead.

I could work as a frontend webdev, I have all the skills I need to host WordPress or static websites on a VPS. I have some JavaScript base knowledge, I can use SCSS and HTML. And that would probably give me some very good extra income. I was even asked to work as a webdev but that never went on, I simply feel like I didn’t care enough and it kinda faded. (Probably most of people would think I am incredibly stupid, and probably I am).

So I asked myself: why do you program? What is the purpose? Why do I prefer to keep my very low income job instead of trying making some decent money with webdev? Why I decided to start learning Rust from zero again instead of focusing on something highly demanded like JavaScript? Why do I prefer to work for free on a free Hugo theme that can build thousands of websites (that would be payed decently) instead of selling the websites themselves?

I think I finally understand it now, it is because I suffered, and I suffered a lot.

I cannot bear someone else in the world suffering that kind of pain. And if I will be able to build, one day, software that helps someone else to come out of this dystopian matrix which is the current software landscape, to which i was so so ipnotized, I will be the happiest person in the world.

I will never be as skilled as an engineer, I will never understand the complicated maths behind coputer machines, I will also probably keep being very poor, and I will probably never change the world. But I feel like software right now lacks humanity, lacks emotion, and since I feel I have so much of both and some skills on it, it is my duty to at least try to do something as difficult as trying to put both of them into my development. There are probably countless super skilled engineers working for big techs, but how many of them put their full hearth into what they are doing?

This is why I program, and it can be ad painful as fulfilling at the same time, other than extremely hard in a not very rewarding approach.

Why you do it?