Synopsis

In a limited sense, this is all my fault.

What Do You Mean?

Last summer, I entered corporate IT as a college intern with wild-eyed wonder. The new world I saw around me didn’t always make sense (do I really have to laugh at jokes in meetings, even if they aren’t funny?), but it turned out to be a good place to work, meaning they pay well and don’t crush my soul. I met some good people, too. Moving on!

Our place of employment is heavily framework-based, so I had to throw out all of my computer science training and focus on learning countless arbitrary programs with countless arbitrary rules. From previous summers, I had the HTML/CSS/Javascript/etc knowledge, but was crippled with a horrible lack of experience with these domain-specific programs. I was partnered with Greg Molyneux, who had both the experience and an eye for design. However, he lacked any and all programming knowledge.

At first, Greg would refuse to make eye contact with me, and we would only make polite conversation. It turns out he’s a little shy. I’ve never been much for small talk, so our early conversations were doomed from the first greeting. However, we quickly became friends through common hardship: dealing with some of the faulty programs our company uses out of tradition.

Since sophomore year of high school, I have had a surprising level of motivation to always come up with projects expand my knowledge of math and computer programming. However, my effort flies out the window with the onset of soul-crushing heat. I usually revive myself in late May with a website redesign, but last summer I wanted to do something extra: I wanted to start a blog. I had heard a lot about WordPress, and I wanted a place I could write my math/programming learnings, just in case someone else might find it useful. It was the best thing I could have done for my own personal growth, but that’s another blog post for another day.

For months, I had been teaching Greg how to design websites the correct way through the separation of presentation and content. He was trying to teach me how to not be red-green colorblind. It turns out I’m a slow learner, and still a failure. Here is a picture of Greg’s teachings: [link].

After I made my blog, he said that he and his friends had been kicking around an idea for collaboration, and maybe a Wordpress blog was just what they were looking for. Greg and I set up his blog, and since then we’ve spent a good number of hours yelling “Why doesn’t this work!?” at CSS changes. Over the months, we have hunted for plugins and passed on advice for managing the blogs.

I gave the kids the keys to the Cadillac. At the moment, I only know Greg, but they’ve got a good thing going in this site. There’s some good content and some good collaboration going.

I take full credit. In a limited sense.

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