Paradigm Shift

2016.04.10

I was doing some browsing last week and I noticed a subtle but specific Paradigm Shift. I was reading someone’s tech blog and knew as soon as the page loaded that it was not only Jekyll, but also specifically the Poole:Lanyon theme for Jekyll that was crafted by Mark Otto of Twitter and Bootstrap fame.

Hint: The reason I know this is because I use the very same theme for MY blog - Isn’t it lovely?

It kind of stunned me how my world has changed since I first embarked upon my specific coding journey to learn to ride the Rails with a shiny little red gem of a language. One year ago I didn’t know Jekyll or Bootstrap existed let alone have the ability to recognize a Jekyll theme at a glance.

Beyond that I’m constantly evaluating websites I visit and iOS Apps I use. I inspect sites to find out what font or CSS framework they’re using so that I can tuck them away for later in my own work. “Oh THAT’S cool! How’d they do THAT?” I get frustrated when sites don’t load properly on mobile, and speculate how I could re-engineer them to function better.

This is a whole different version of me than was sitting here a year ago, new skills, new knowledge, new insights. It’s not so much a question of expertise as of having the veil lifted such that I now see more than I did before.

I realize I’m still green. I realize I’m little more than a glorified script-kiddie IOW the “Novice Hacker” phase in the life of a developer and that the vast wealth of knowledge that I have YET to learn far exceeds that which I have thus far learned, but at this point I have taken the red pill and every day I view interconnected technology as an engineer rather than as a consumer.

~AMP