I mean isn't it basically a fluke that we all ended up as programmers? I don't I'd think be half as interested in computers as I am if my dad didn't bring us home a computer when I was 3 or 4, or if my grandmother didn't randomly get me a book about "How to make your own website" for my tenth birthday. She didn't get me this because I'd shown a particular interest in computers, it was just one book among a bunch of books "for boys", most of the rest of which were about football. So the relationship between the society in which I grew up and the gender it assigned me at birth also contributed to my becoming a programmer, and definitely in more ways than just being the reason I got that book. I also happened to be lucky enough to participate in a programme for "talented" kids, and one of the courses they offered was in programming (they taught me Java when I was 13), and I was able to use the skills I learnt from that to pick up Javascript and PHP (for my website). Then one of my older cousins introduced me to Linux, and that kind of paved the way for me becomming a "real" programmer, when I started writing little programs to make my life easier in Linux.
And it was basically luck that all of those things happened, and happened at the right times in my life so that they all had the effect that they did. I might have ended up doing something completely different if, for example, my parents weren't able to afford to send me on that course at which I learnt how to program properly. I became a programmer because certain things happened at certain times in my life to make me interested in programming and to give me to means to pursue that interest. Luck was the reason that those things happened to me, not the way I think or because I somehow have a magical programmer brain that made me destined to program. That's obviously absurd. Those things could have happened to anybody. Everybody can be a programmer. We're not better than everybody else.
I mean isn't it basically a fluke that we all ended up as programmers? I don't I'd think be half as interested in computers as I am if my dad didn't bring us home a computer when I was 3 or 4, or if my grandmother didn't randomly get me a book about "How to make your own website" for my tenth birthday. She didn't get me this because I'd shown a particular interest in computers, it was just one book among a bunch of books "for boys", most of the rest of which were about football. So the relationship between the society in which I grew up and the gender it assigned me at birth also contributed to my becoming a programmer, and definitely in more ways than just being the reason I got that book. I also happened to be lucky enough to participate in a programme for "talented" kids, and one of the courses they offered was in programming (they taught me Java when I was 13), and I was able to use the skills I learnt from that to pick up Javascript and PHP (for my website). Then one of my older cousins introduced me to Linux, and that kind of paved the way for me becomming a "real" programmer, when I started writing little programs to make my life easier in Linux.
And it was basically luck that all of those things happened, and happened at the right times in my life so that they all had the effect that they did. I might have ended up doing something completely different if, for example, my parents weren't able to afford to send me on that course at which I learnt how to program properly. I became a programmer because certain things happened at certain times in my life to make me interested in programming and to give me to means to pursue that interest. Luck was the reason that those things happened to me, not the way I think or because I somehow have a magical programmer brain that made me destined to program. That's obviously absurd. Those things could have happened to anybody. Everybody can be a programmer. We're not better than everybody else.