The Poetry of Ruby (Or How an Artsy-Gay-Venezuelan Boy Ended Up Becoming a Coder)
My dad is a business man and he wanted me to be one. My dream, however, was to become a poet and win a Nobel Prize in Literature (“was” because it no longer “is”. What is my dream now days? Not getting COVID-19? World peace? Another season of Rick & Morty?)
Growing up, I never liked sports or video games, and I wasn’t too much of a computer kid: I never knew how to fix the wifi when it stopped working (I still don’t know how, to be honest). What I really liked were movies and books. Through high school I read the Twilight novels, watched the Harry Potter movies and took poetry classes hoping to one day become a famous, rich artist.
15 year old me would be surprised to find out I am now on my way to become a Software Developer. What I would say to teenage Frank (and to all the sensitive, aspiring artists reading this blog) is that art is anything that art-iculates something. Photos, videos, paintings, they all express something to somebody. Communication is crucial to humans, so much so, that scientists commonly date the beginning of history to the Cognitive Revolution about 70,000 years ago, when Homo sapiens started developing language that allowed them to cooperate in exponential numbers. All animals have languages, but ours seem to be the only ones complex enough for abstract thinking, planning depth, exploitation of large game, blade technology and symbolic behavior (music, dance, flowers on a grave, sculptures to gods).
If you are still reading and somewhat agree with my pretentious bullshit so far, then you’d also grant me the chance to say that all of those stories that inspired me, provoked me, sadden me and rejoiced me when I was young are not only a commodity but a necessity. Storytelling may very well be one of the most important tools in our species survival. We are the only animals capable of speaking and teaching our offspring about objects and events not present. I’ve always been a storyteller, and I always will. So here is a story:
def first_contact
puts “Hello, World!”
end
This is a story told not in English, but in Ruby, which is not a human language, but a computer one. It begins with the creation of a method called “first_contact”, it tells the story of a human asking a computer to send a message into the world, and then it ends (like all things do, including ourselves and the universe).
Deciding to enroll in Flatiron School so I could learn how to talk to computers took me a long time. I came to the US in 2014 to study Filmmaking because I had some shit to say about matters I cared about (climate change, LGBTQ+ rights, Latin American politics, etc). But making movies is expensive and almost impossible if you don’t live in Los Angeles, so to pay the bills I took a job as a video editor for a wedding company. I did it for 4 years until I discovered tech. It began with a podcast about Python, then a book about Pixar, then a conference about AI, and silly as it might be, it wasn’t long until I started watching Javascript tutorials and jumping from Adobe Premiere Pro to Dreamweaver.
I could no longer think about the social problems that had always been closed to my heart without contemplating tech/code solutions for them. I thought of an app that could help LGBTQ+ people connect and congregate in places other than bars. I discovered a non-profit organization called CODE for Venezuela and I became obsessed with Tesla’s energy efficiency machinery.
Further more, not only did code invaded my ideals but also my day-to-day life: if I searched for jobs in Netflix “encoding”, “machine learning and modeling“ and “adaptive bitrate streaming” were all required skills (What the hell do any these words mean, anyway?) When I checked for jobs in small Houston marketing agencies, promo videos were merely a little part of a package including Website Development and UX Design.
Apparently, knowing how to edit video is no longer enough if you want to be a video editor, you have to know how to edit a website and while you’re at it your boss may ask you to edit the whole computer software too, because why not? Nevetheless, I still didn’t consider myself smart enough to become a computer person. Until something really strange happened…
People around the world started to cared about climate change and feminism. But, how come? Why now? Why all of the sudden? These issues have been there forever. The data has been there for decades, scientists have shown the charts about rising levels of CO2 and economists have displayed gender pay gap statistics for decades, so why now?
The reason is, it seems to me, that scientists and economists aren’t good storytellers. It wasn’t until actors, writers and musicians translated the charts and statistics into movies, novels, podcast, essays and songs that the masses understood the severity of these two crises. Therefore, to put a human face on the numbers is useful, and that is want I wanted to do. That’s why I enrolled in Flatiron School. I want to become a Software Engineer. I want to turn science into art, data into stories.
For centuries, philosophers have argued about the trolley problem without never really coming with a solution, and they could keep on arguing for centuries more because philosophers are really chill people. Even if they came up with a final solution, it would be one they can’t prove: in such situation, you never know the kind of reaction you would really have in the heat of the moment, regardless of your ethics.
Enter Tesla and their self-driving cars. Although engineers are not good storytellers either, they are very efficient and often impatient people. They won’t wait for a couple more centuries for philosophers to provide answers, they need to sell these cars now or Elon Musk will fire them. Whatever these engineers decide is the solution for the trolley problem, it will be the real solution. This solution will be proven time after time because cars are not humans, and they will always do what it is put on their code. It is my impression that there are countless of this kind of dilemmas in the tech industry and I think there is value in the solutions and ideas that I bring to the table (If you are reading this, Elon, please hire me).
Here is another story:
29,086 measures barley 37 months Kushim
This is not code, but ancient Summerian. Juval Noah Harari says it’s most probable reading is: ‘A total of 29,086 measures of barley were received over the course of 37 months. Signed, Kushim.’ This is perhaps the oldest sentence ever written in human history, 33 centuries before Christ, and if Kushim was indeed a person, he or she was the first person in history whose name we know.
And Kushim, you see, was not a king or queen, or a poet, or a soldier or a prophet. Kushim was an accountant.
I’m still meditating on what this means for me regarding language and art.
To finish, I must admit that I have tried to start a blog for the past ten 10 years. I probably have a dozen of WordPress accounts that I opened, never used, and which passwords I forgot. Despite my love for movie reviews and think peices, I never brought myself to publish my own words. Funny indeed, that because I decided to become a computer geek I now have the opportunity to write for real.
Also, speaking of poetry and code, here is a poem written in Ruby:
