Stepping up
5 October 2019
I’ve made a contribution to Stack Overflow for the first time. That feels like a sort of milestone. I’m not a big user of the site — mostly find my way to it by way of googling concerning something or other I’m trying to accomplish in a WordPress setting, so that I think of myself not so much as ‘member of the community’ as I do as scavenger lurking at the periphery. It’s just one of any number of places where I might find a little info applicable to whatever the problem at hand happens to be. Here, unusually, I cobbled together the solution I wanted mostly out of several answers proposed to the one question item (a 6-year-old post). Once I had it, it seemed worth appending there as a new answer — though it’s more synthesis from what was already there than distinct proposal.
Quite a minor milestone, then, if milestone it is. It is some record in public (however publicly insignificant), at any rate, of recent-ish progress in my competence with technologies that have become universal and very basic just in my lifetime as an adult.
Hey, that’s pretty tidy! The age of the post reminds me of some of the issues I’ve had with Linux-based office applications. Most were smoothed out in subsequent editions, but there are some issues, usually in document formatting, that require the user to think EXACTLY like a programmer. Intuition does not serve the user.
Have fairly mixed feelings about developing in this area. I’m hardly the ‘non-technical’ sort, but what romantic notions of the coding life I’ve entertained didn’t survive adolescence. Post-college forays into graphics work ended in part because I understood that without art-school-level discipline (and pedigree), I’d very likely have to come to know the internet-server and the browser in more intimate ways than I cared to, and combine skill sets more or less as I’ve returned to doing today. At the time, I preferred getting back into construction and dreams (romantic notions not confined to adolescence) of eventually working with architects somehow. That’s a choice still close to my heart in a lot of ways, as I expect you recognize. But things change.