There used to be a time in the late eighties in which, for me, being the younger brother hurt. I have a brother who is 3 years older than me, and I used to hang with him and my older cousins. Needless to say that I learned a lot from them but, as a pre-teenager, I was always trying to look older than I really was, and that hurt. It was like I was never enough. The fact that I was almost as tall as they were didn’t help much, because it gave me a crazy hope, as if one day I would be able to reach their age and even overtake them. Nuts, isn’t it?
Then there came this day when I felt like a God in front of my older brother…
In the beginning…
We had this old computer, a Spectrum 128k. We used to play with it a lot. For those who didn’t have this kind of experience, the average game in an Spectrum took like 5 minutes just to get loaded. The games code was in cassette tapes. We put the cassette in the tape player, in my case integrated in the computer’s hardware along with the keyboard (there was no mouse at the time), we wrote the legendary load “” and the game started to load, making that not less legendary sound Piiiii pi; piiiii piribiribirbiri…
And we sat and waited, reading our favorite video games magazine while the game was being loaded. And sometimes, there were errors that didn’t show up until the load was almost done. So, imagine, waiting for 5 minutes or more to be able to play, and when you had your hand on the joystick, prepared to have fun, crash: an error occurred and you had to reload and wait for another 5 minutes. It was a like a PhD in patience science. Imagine the hunger and excitement in a couple of kids that were longing to play when, after a series of failed loads, it finally worked.
The city of loosened screws
The thing is, there was a screw on our Spectrum’s integrated tape player that got loosened every now and then. When this happened, even the most reliable of the tapes didn’t load. After several frustrated attempts, my brother gave up. But I didn’t want to give up. I ended up discovering that when I tightened a bit the littlle screw with a very thin and little screwdriver that my father owned… voila: it came back to life!
My brother couldn’t believe it. ‘How did you do it?’ he asked me. I just kept quiet and smiled, as if to say ‘to me it’s no big deal’. I remember him looking at me with this kind of adoration, his eyes swimming in amazement and finally shouting ‘it’s a miracle!! A MIRACLE!!!’
It felt so good that I decided to make a ritual about it. When the screw got loosened again, I went for the screwdriver without being seen, hide it up my sleeve and asked my brother in a very earnest voice to leave the room. Then I locked myself in the living room where we used to play to perform what finally became known as THE MIRACLE. I did my thing, opened the door, and say to my brother: ‘let’s play!’. And he used to shout that ‘MIRACLE! MIIIRACLE!!’ when the game loaded at once.
Why am I telling you this? Because I recognize in that story the seed of a spoiled tree that is very common in the IT industry: the sophisticators, I call them (do not confuse being a Sophist with what I call being a sophisticator). To sophisticate is the art of wanting to make something look more complicated than it actually is, in order to accomplish some other kind of hidden agenda (for example, to feel more important than the others, like I did with my ‘miracle‘).
This kind of powerful and dangerous feeling (because of its addictiveness) of almost religiously elitizing yourself because you have a secret knowledge is very common, not only in our industry. In fact, it’s a very old game; at least, as old as the law jargon. To hide the simplicity, covering it with layers of sophistication in order to make us seem more intelligent, powerful, etc. is dangerous because you could end up believing that you are more intelligent, powerful, etc., than the rest. Are you a sophisticator? I know I’ve been one, sometimes, I must say… And, as such, what ensures me that I won’t relapse into sophisticating again? Just to keep on asking myself, again and again, am I sophisticating now? Can I make this simpler or, at least, less complicated?
I suspect that whatever cannot be said clearly is probably not being thought clearly either.
Peter Singer
You could argue, ‘but A good magician never reveals his tricks’. That’s probably true. But IT, as magic as it may seem, is not magic, at least in the sense that, with magic, the public agrees to be tricked. They accept that what they’re going to experience is an illusion. The true miracle in IT is not being able to understand complexity, as pleasant as that may feel. The miracle is to be able to traverse seeming complexity until you reach its inner simplicity, and to be able to share that simplicity with others.
I’m going to leave you with a great reflection by Uncle Bob, from his most famous book Clean Code. While you enjoy it, let me go back to my memories, open the door of my living-room and tell my brother about the screwdriver. See you soon!
In general programmers are pretty smart people. Smart people sometimes like to show off their smarts by demonstrating their mental juggling abilities. After all, if you can reliably remember that r is the lower-cased version of the url with the host and scheme removed, then you must clearly be very smart.
One difference between a smart programmer and a professional programmer is that the professional understands that clarity is king. Professionals use their powers for good and write code that others can understand.
From Clean Code, by Bob C. Martin
