Blog by Sumana Harihareswara, Changeset founder
Programmers Who Then Do Something Really Different
Hi, reader. I wrote this in 2015 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 So it may be very out of date; the world, and I, have changed a lot since I wrote it!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 recently learned that Courtney Milan, a romance author who's worked as a lawyer and programmer (much like sci-fi author Ken Liu), has also written some ecommerce-related PHP code and released it under the GPL, which makes my day.
I try to keep a mental list of people who have done substantial programming or computer science work and then taken their expertise to a very different field of endeavor, such as music, activism, electoral politics, or fiction writing. We're used to hearing about programmers moving into tech management (including founding startups or managing open source communities) or teaching engineering, but I like to remember that programmers also run for Congress and write TV shows.
The list goes on and on (and I am oversimplifying labels here and leaving a zillion people out -- this is just some people I have heard of):
- Randall Munroe, cartoonist
- Vienna Teng, musician
- Jonathan Coulton, musician
- Ken Liu, fiction author
- Charles Stross, fiction author
- Darcy Burner, Congressional candidate & activist
- Seth Schoen, activist
- Vernor Vinge, fiction author
- Ellen Ullman, fiction author
- Ryan North, cartoonist
- Neal Stephenson, fiction author
- John O'Neill, fiction editor
- Naomi Novik, fiction author
- Kristofer Straub, cartoonist
- Leonard Richardson, fiction author
- probably Jerry McNerney, Congressional Representative
- Jane Espenson, screenwriter
- Courtney Milan, fiction author
- Ken MacLeod, fiction author
- Zoe Keating, musician
- Kathy Sierra, horse trainer & interdisciplinary educator
- Mel Chua, education researcher
- James Vasile, lawyer
- Valerie Aurora, activist
- Mary Gardiner, activist
- Danny O'Brien, activist
- Aaron Swartz, activist
- Diana Gabaldon, fiction author
- Luis Villa, lawyer
- Jamie Zawinski, nightclub owner
- Fureigh, musician
- Danni (friend of mine), bike mechanic
This is trivia, and I am temperamentally suited to accumulating trivia. But I also like remembering that everyone I meet may have skills I don't immediately see. This bartender, that full-time parent, the candidate for city council whose junk mail I just got -- this might be the second or third or fourth career for any of them, and if we got to talking, maybe we'd all get super animated as we told stories about hilarious bugs.
