Hello, World.

by Micah

Two words.

Two words that dont mean much to most people. But today, they meant the world to me.

When I was about eight years old, my dad brought home a TRS-80 (If you wanna get super geeky, it did have a 5.25″ floppy drive, which was a 40-track double density drive so it was a Model II. My dad did not splurge for the special TRS-80 desk Radio Shack was selling at the time).

I remember watching the command prompt sit there while the cursor blinked, and then my dad, like most of the hackers of his time, write what seemed like random lines of text.

“Whatcha doin’?” I would ask.

“Working,” he would reply.

It was around that time that my dad started working at Stanford University as a buyer in the procurement department. To this day, we have more computers in the house than people, and it wasnt strange to find my dad pulling a motherboard out of an Osborne suitcase portable and replacing it with an upgraded part. I think he often mentioned it was “research,” but being an old shortwave radio operator, I think it was really “a hobby.”

After about the 37th or so time asking my dad what he was up-to, he turned to me and said, “would you like to learn about computers?”

Excitedly, I replied, “of course!!” And he handed me a book with the word BASIC written on the front. It was a big book full of words and text I didnt understand, but I sat down and started to read it.

“Sit here,” smiled my dad as he pointed to the desk chair. “You will have to type some of that stuff in.”

Over the next few days, I read and typed, and read and typed, and finally I wrote this:

10 PRINT “HELLO WORLD”

20 GOTO 10

RUN

And as the words “HELLO WORLD” ran nonstop across the screen, I turned to my dad, and said “see?”

“I see. Now keep going.”

After a month or so, I decided that I wanted to write games. At my dad’s office was a mainframe with Zork and Roguelike on it. I played the text based adventures and loved them. When I asked my dad about writing games, he handed me another book. Across the front was the word LOGO.

“Can’t you just tell me how?” I complained.

“No.”

After a few weeks, I typed in:

print [Hello World]

I turned to my dad, and said “see?”

“I see. Now keep going.”

Over the next months, I became adept at Wordstar and played around with BASIC and LOGO. I quickly ran out of steam, and as I got into sports and the summer, I forgot about coding.

Until this past week.

I have been working in technology startups for most of my life. I always assumed three things: 1) developers tend to overstate how long it will take to get anything done; and 2) they also overstate the difficulty; 3) complicated answers are always more fun than easy solutions.

This past week, our technical lead expressed frustration that I seemed to have little respect for how hard our developers were working. That I clearly didnt understand how hard developing software is, and that it was making it hard to keep everyone motivated.

“You dont get it.”

I thought about it for the rest of the day. I consider myself to be a business development guy, and its clear thats its a job that is often hard to define. Software development was easy to define. You got to actually build something. You knew if you were doing the right thing, because it was self-evident. It existed.

But, perhaps I had a lack of compassion. Perhaps I was not empathizing enough with our developers.

“Charley, whats the best n00b tutorial for Rails?”

“What are you talking about?” Charley responded.

“You know we have been looking for developers. Perhaps I will just teach myself to code, and save money on hiring one,” I chuckled. (yes, I chuckle. I like chuckling. You should try it, Chuckles.)

Laughing, he pointed me towards a Rails Tutorial. I proceeded to buy all the screencasts, and late Thursday, I sat down and started on page 1.

Here I am, four days later, and I am up to chapter 3. I have set up my environment, learned about gems, I even downloaded Textmate, and uploaded a very basic app to Heroku.

And at about mid-day on Sunday, I wrote an app that returned “Hello, World”

I called my dad and told him, “see?”

“Great, now keep at it.”

As a CEO, its really important to understand each job function within your organization. I will never be a coder. In fact, I think I barely understand what it takes to be a developer. But, at the bare minimum, I was reminded of the thrill of getting an application to work. I was reminded of the pure joy of building something. I felt the freedom of creation.

Monday is a scant 9 hours away. Between now and then I plan to continue to work my way through this book, and perhaps graduate beyond “Hello, World.” I also plan on spending some time with our developers asking the questions on how we can create an environment that will allow them to both be efficient and give them the opportunity to be creative in their solutions.

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