code

There's a picture of two-year-old me standing on my dad's desk in his office, his arm around me as he used his computer and I observed intently.

Nearly every week of my childhood, I visited that office at the local state university. By the time I was ten, I'd gotten my hands on (and probably destroyed) dozens of floppy disks.

I missed MySpace's heyday, but I got my first taste of HTML on Kidzworld and Foopets—social networks I stumbled upon during my unrestrained explorations of the Internet.

On my profiles, I learned to add splashes of color, make bold moves, and use

In middle school, I graduated to Tumblr. My Hunger Games fandom blog evolved to include Percy Jackson, Harry Potter, social justice posts, and memes tastefully scattered across the cringe and shitpost scales.

My ability to customize my (rented) real estate on the Internet dramatically increased. I could choose a blog theme from Tumblr's large collection, some made by fellow users... I could peek under the hood at the theme's code... I could

and see what happened... and repeat until I became fluent in CSS and HTML.

Immediately I wanted to make themes for all my blogs, for other people, and even create more blogs with ambitious goals. I experimented with box-shadow and infinite scroll plugins, and committed variables like {block:Photoset-500} to heart during my earliest experiences reading 🅱️ocumentation.

I tried a few times to get into the business of making themes for others. fluentthemes.tumblr.com was one attempt, and radiantxthemes (whose branding was consistent with radiantxrad, the URL I’d chosen over my original half-bloods for some reason) was another.

It was so easy to make new Tumblr blogs, and with each blog came the hope of joining and becoming respected in a niche community. Inspired by incredible fan art from self-taught artists, I decided to start an art blog on the first day of Inktober, a challenge to publish art every day of October.

I used my small Wacom tablet to draw one thing, and that’s as far as I got. At some point prior to that, I think I also drew some comic panels on GIMP… using my… mouse? Not sure what was going on here, but the dedication was there.

I created a fitness blog and fortunately the content I consumed promoted health and strength, countering the toxic messages that many others heard and were susceptible to at that age.

And, of course, my language blog went strong for several years. Through that community of "aspiring polyglots," as many of us called ourselves, I not only got support and inspiration, but also learned about linguistics—I field that was never mentioned in the walls of my high school and barely in college too.

I enjoyed jokes about the variations in how people pronounce "eyy lawyer" and became adamant that Internet slang is fascinating, African American Vernacular English is nuanced and valid, and prescriptivism is often elitist and unnecessary. I knew MIT for Noam Chomsky and linguistics far before I knew it for, well, everything else we do, I guess.

Anyway, when I hear today’s craze about learning to code, I can’t help but think back to how I learned it—a lucky, arbitrary culmination of circumstances. I then used this skill in pretty much everything I did afterwards, directly or indirectly.

Being able to code is definitely helpful for getting employed, and especially if you’re programming anything more than a static website, it requires logical reasoning. To me, though, the most meaningful aspect of it is that it gives you a tool with which you can build things creatively.