The Developer's Code

Chapter 1Introduction

I’ve been had by code. Twice.

The very first time was when I took a programming class during my freshman year of college. It was a mandatory course for the curriculum I had decided to enroll in. It wasn’t like what I had seen in so many movies during my childhood. I didn’t type in a few simple commands, press Enter, and watch a trash-can robot say “hello.”

There wasn’t even a trash-can robot in this class. Instead, it was about pointers, memory allocation, and object instantiation. I was too in the weeds to see what all of it meant. However, the evidence was overwhelmingly clear: programming was not for me.

I wanted to be an artist or perhaps a mathematician. I wanted to be both creative and exact—both right- and ...