Blog by Sumana Harihareswara, Changeset founder

30 Nov 2012, 16:54 p.m.

I Am A Software Developer

Hi, reader. I wrote this in 2012 and it's now more than five years old. So it may be very out of date; the world, and I, have changed a lot since I wrote it! I'm keeping this up for historical archive purposes, but the me of today may 100% disagree with what I said then. I rarely edit posts after publishing them, but if I do, I usually leave a note in italics to mark the edit and the reason. If this post is particularly offensive or breaches someone's privacy, please contact me.

I arrived in San Francisco yesterday in just enough time to speed to Wikimedia Foundation headquarters and present:

Watch, live, via screensharing as a developer fixes a bug, including investigation, git commit, getting it reviewed and merged, and closing the Bugzilla ticket. Probably featuring Sumana Harihareswara. Great for newbies!
About 25 people watched the YouTube stream, which you can now view (it's about the first 20 minutes; the IRC log starts at 20:30:36). A copy of the video should get to Wikimedia Commons sometime in the next week.

A small part of me thought I was defrauding the viewers by masquerading as a developer. Because, sure, I fix user-visible strings and all, and I can read code okay, but (insert moving-the-goalposts here).

This morning, of course, I woke up too early from jet lag, and was listening to calming music, trying to get back to sleep. And then I realized that I hadn't fixed the second half of the demo bug. So I dragged myself upright and opened my laptop and made the fix.

Okay, now I'm a developer. An occasional, entry-level software developer, but one nonetheless. I viscerally believe that the ritual that brought me into that guild was not yesterday's commit, but today's.

Comments

Anonymous
anonymous@example.org
30 Nov 2012, 19:53 p.m.

I think you're the only person who ever doubted it. :)