i don't understand programmers

tulips.gay v3 is now live. It features various things™ and stuff™. You can go around and click buttons. Some of them even do things. You can go click the link to Arbiter and read it. You can go click the pay me button and give me 20 dollars right now. You have to give me 20 dollars and also read Arbiter.

I have to start this website with something. Here is my something. If you have stumbled across this website because you are searching me up after I applied for a software engineering position, 1) how and 2) please don't read this.

I really dreaded making the next iteration of this website because of my general severe distaste for computing and programming. I really hate CSS, I really hate web design, and god knows I hate JavaScript; it's like the "oh god, do I really have to" of programming languages to me. It's like forcing a kid to eat vegetables, but the vegetables are literally poisonous and keep returning null.

On the other hand, I really didn't want to have anyone else make this site. For one, tulips.gay v2 (do not expect this link to work in perpetuity) was cribbed basically entirely from CobaltVelvet's down to the way the CSS was structured, and then I just messed with the CSS until it worked. It meant that I had literally no understanding of how my own site functioned, so when I went to actually add stuff, I didn't have any understanding of what to change except to mess around with variables. v1 of this site was even worse, when I literally used a template somebody made in 2015 or something and went from there. It didn't work on mobile and it also had a bunch of information that I don't want to share with people on it. (You can find it on the Internet Archive if you really want.)

But the problem is that I had to then confront programming. I got a degree in computer science, and I got it for a reason, and I don't really understand what that reason was anymore. It eludes me about as much as everything else about my life does. When talking to me, I will throw around "computer toucher" like it's a slur. I do not understand programming for its own sake. As evidenced by the title, I have not made any headway in this department. To me, it makes about as much sense as getting really into fire alarms. You know that what you're using is a tool, right? It's a means to an end, and the end is not burning your house down. You don't want to burn your house down, but that doesn't mean you're an enthusiast about the prospect of it.

What I actually found, after getting over my mental hurdle, was that I really enjoyed working on this site? I really appreciated that the things that I was doing were concretely making a thing that I actually wanted to make. I would change some random line of code and then suddenly there was an obvious impact on an end product that I like and enjoy. That was neat to me. But now that I am done with that, I have no particular compulsion to continue making websites, and I certainly have no compulsion to overengineer things for the future. Half the reason I'm writing this article is to be able to set up the rants page on the site, and then be done with it.

Back when I was a programmer, I spent a lot of time doing side projects that were "just to learn the language" or something. I would do Advent of Code not because I thought it was particularly fun but because I was a programmer and that was a thing that programmers did. I would stay up until 4AM writing a domain-specific language to solve a problem not because I was enjoying debugging but because I had to. Nowadays, I look at this with a lot of disdain. I don't understand why you would want to learn a skill, and therefore you make a project you don't care about to make more projects you don't care about. It becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

So this is what I think now; programming is a thing you do, and certainly not a thing you are. There is a fundamental mismatch in the minds of many hobbyists in this regard; it's in the type of person who lists off Linux distros in their bio on some obscure "decentralized" social media platform as if it's a personality trait. It's a thing that says nothing about you except how you choose to spend your time, creating things for the sake of creation rather than because you have a thing you want to create. It's not wrong to enjoy the process and not the product, but does that process define you? Does your "doing" become a "being" just because you did it sooooo much?

I don't know. I call myself a writer, but I don't think that informs my personality at all. Maybe that's a skill issue on my part. I like Homestuck, but god, I would never call myself a Homestuck. Am I a furry? Who knows. This is not a thing with an answer. I am not doing a sweeping philosophical treatise here. I am not making a point you can come home with, because I do not have a point to make.

All this is to say that there is a website and you can click stuff on it. Thanks to basile and Tautology for design consult, thanks to spicyyeti, dd o0 bentl, Cam Collins, and max bradbury for being people that I do not know who have cool websites that I took design ideas from. I will add an Atom feed for this when I feel like it. I will also add a funny 88x31 button. John wick voice yeah.