Sawubona Mhlaba... {Hello World} from South Africa!
Hello Steamers!
My name is Kurt and I like to write code.
(And this is what I look like when I am asked to dress neatly in black for a company photo)
As mentioned above I am a programmer - which essentially makes me one of the highest paid typists in the world since I chose to type in languages they did not teach in school. At least this is in regards to the common perception of what I do anyway. Let me try this again...
My name is Kurt and I solve problems for a living.
Ahhh… that is much better, as well as being far more accurate since typing is probably the part of my job that I enjoy the least. I am 25 years old and have been programming for 8 years now and I am still just a passionate and excited about it as the day I begun. If there is anything I really love it is technology and people since they have infinite potential and their abilities are only limited by what we can dream up next.
There have always been things I wish I could change in the world around me.
I have always been fairly intelligent to the point that I can hold my own in a drunken debate and like everyone else I have always had ambitious dreams for the world. Sadly also like everyone else I am all to familiar with pang of remorse I still feel from having to file them away one by one with everything else I wish I could have achieved in life.
Many of these concepts only achieve the status of dream because I had to come to the realisation that as small as they were they were beyond my ability to implement and I will never reap the reward of seeing them come to fruition, even though at on the surface they are so simple and logical it is hard to believe that they are not in common practice.
I.e. mostly stuff like...
- War is bad.
- Driving fast instead of going the speed limit between robots only increases traffic.
- Raising your voice above everyone else’s to tell them to be quieter only makes people speak louder.
Learning to program completely changed my life.
When I was 14 my father suddenly passed away from cancer and I have been on my own ever since. I had to turn down full scholarships from 4 of the top private high-schools around me since I could not afford boarding fees. Instead I went to a public school and dropped out 2 years later when I was 16 because I wasn't earning enough money working weekends to afford to live with a trace of dignity.
To be honest school was never really for me anyway, but this left me with a serious problem. I could have been the smartest person on the planet and I still wouldn't have been able to get anyone to take a raggedy 16 year old drop-out seriously. A year before I dropped out I had already completed the MSCE course from Microsoft but I could not afford to write the exam.
Months before my dropping out I had a decent job in I.T. lined up with a large corporate I used to work part time for on weekends but by the time I had left school a policy known as Black Economic Empowerment had passed which made it illegal for me to be hired... especially in place of a black man with a higher education level than I had. The timing just sucked.
In our society I had no voice and my dreams and ideas had no value
After a few years I worked my way up to managing a supermarket, all the while desperately trying in vain to get a job in I.T. I never got a call for even a single interview. I had gone as far as the paperwork that was my identity would allow me to and I would have still been stuck in that job if I never learnt to code.
I taught myself to program and used my new skills to make the terrible parts of my job easier and all of a sudden my ideas had a physical presence and impact on the world, they were reaching people and since then no one has ever judged me by a piece of paper again.
Writing programs gave me a voice again.
Programming gave me a way to code the change I wanted to see in the world so that other people could see it too, it gave me a way to prove the ideas that up until that moment had been crackpot theories and most importantly programming gave me back my dignity and pride.
This was not due to any spectacular gifts, luck or talent I may have had. It was because it gave me a way to express my dreams and ideas to millions of people in a way that they could interpret and understand them.
Code is just a tool.
Like I said I make my living from solving problems. The code I type is just the medium I use to express my solution - no different to paint on a canvas. I believe that learning to program can have the same impact on other peoples lives as it had on mine and that it will have a positive effect on even the poorest student.
After all when a 6 year old draws a terrible scribbled picture you still share their vision even if it is a bit messy and I believe that learning how deconstruct a large unmanageable problem into smaller solvable pieces could never hurt anyone. This is why I write tutorials and articles.
It's simply another dream that I refuse to file away.
I have written previous pieces on Medium. Due to my tight schedule and Steamit having many users I most likely have never reached I will be reposting some of my old pieces over the next course of the next week. If they can inspire even one more person to hack away at their keyboard in eager frustration I've met my goal.
Welkom mede to Steem! :D