Hey, I’m the girlish thing over there.
I’m Nora. I’m a sofware dev who is (as of writing this) still in school. I’m close to 30, I live in the American Southwest on stolen land. I do what I can to leave no trace.
I remember the first time I got a computer to do something I told it to do.
And I don’t mean like, opening a web browser or sending an email. I don’t mean installing software or even an operating system. I’m talking about giving my pc an original thought, and having it act on that thought.
Okay… maybe original is a bit of a stretch. Have you ever seen that silly 1980’s movie WarGames starring Matthew Broderick? Well, when I was a child my little brother and I watched that movie together and decided we wanted to talk to Joshua. Obviously AI wasn’t a thing yet 22 years ago, heck even Cleverbot wouldn’t be around for another 4 years. So what is an autodidactic child to do when the thing they want doesn’t exist? Obviously the answer is to teach themselves BATCH at 7 years old.
So you learned to program because of Ferris Bueller?
No? That would be silly. I learned to script because of Ferris Bueller. I learned to program almost a decade later in high school. Y’all ever try to make something sound impressive without lying and realize that “Oh shit, wait did I actually do an impressive thing there?”
So when I was in high school, I taught myself the Arduino flavor of C++. This was mostly because I was in an engineering course and my teammate and I were looking at an electronic solution for a project. We were making underwater ROVs and we were exploring a self-leveling quad-copter system. None of us had the experience necessary to do it back then but we learned SO MUCH through the experimentation phase. I took what I learned and used it for my senior project.
The project was a failure: a huge, stinking failure. Or… so I thought. Sure I failed to make a completely automated skittle sorting machine. But I succeeded in developing a machine vision system. It was stupid simple, all it did was detect color with a ccd, run the signal through an adc, and use an if loop to make a servo move. The code worked, the failure was in my massive overestimation of my solid modelling skills and of the quality of the Makerbot 3D printer circa 2013.
That was over a decade ago, what’ve you been doing since then?
Oof, I was hoping you wouldn’t ask that. Or… I was hoping I wouldn’t… ask that.
Anyway, uhh, rotting mostly?
BIG piece of advice for all the college aged kids who might come accross this post. When you decide at 19 years old that you’re ready to get married? When you know for absolute sure that everyone who’s telling you not to is wrong? When you get the thought: “yeah, but it won’t happen to me.” You’re wrong. Take it from someone who thought those same things. You’re wrong. You don’t know them. You don’t even know yourself yet. Your brain is done cooking at 26, let it go til then before you settle down with someone. Or be like me and spend years with someone who convinced you that you were in love until the mutual resentment finally builds enough to allow for an amicable split. Divorce sucks, even when it’s easy.
And do you have any idea how hard it is to make progress in a life you don’t want to be living? I’m trans. Realized it at 9, again at 12, 14, 20, and finally 25 was enough to decide death or transition. Pretending to be a dude does not spark joy. I started drinking whiskey and smoking cowboy killers to look more manly. Grew a long bushy beard to hide my baby-face. I grew stoic. I learned to be gruff. I thought of everything I thought a man was supposed to do and did it. I thought manliness was just accepting that life is sorrow. Imagine my surprise when I find out men, real men, actually like manly things. They don’t need to pretend to be manly to feel like a man. Imagine my surprise when I read on reddit one day on a lunch break that “it’s not normal to cry in the mirror and wish you were born the opposite sex”.
So in the mean-time I did what I had to, in order to survive. I failed out of college and stopped trying, that was 2016. I got a job at Starbucks, proceeded to mainline their kool-aid for a few years, was even dumb enough to try to get promoted to shift supervisor. Like, why did I do that? That job sucked! I did the bux for 5-ish years before I rage-quit over a text exchange with my boss, then got a job at Visionworks. Visionworks was AMAZING… until I moved states. If you’re in the Houston area and need work as a college aged person, check out Visionworks. If you’re in MY area (sorry folks, that ones a secret), I wouldn’t recommend working there, not if you’re queer anyway.
Between work and sleep I mostly watched tiktoks and reels that whole time. I lost years to those apps. I don’t even have a smartphone anymore, couldn’t maintain a healthy relationship with it. Close to the time I quit visionworks I realized I was spending close to 14 hours a day scrolling tiktok. It will happen to you. Just ask (who my wonderful partner affectionately calls) bird girl. It’s pigeon science, and its all the rage on the web.
So like, what do you do then?
I like learning 🙂
I spend a lot of time learning about Linux, and watching the science communicators I’ve followed over the years. Lately I’ve been back in school to get my AAS in Software Application Development. I’ve taken courses in Python and SQL, and I’m teaching myself C right now. I like Django, it’s good stuff. I want to focus on creating a cleaner web as I move forward in my career. I want to build for the new web. Not Web3, web3 sucks. The new, old web. Gemini, Gopher, Yggdrasil… DECENTRALIZATION BABY!
I wanna make p2p hosting easy. I wanna make it reliable. I wanna do the thing they tried to do in Silicon Valley, but I wanna do it with likeminded people around the world instead of a corpo-cult. Give Peter’s Pied Piper a Poison Pepper because I’m just giving away Sears homes with rat defense systems.
This girl really knows how to ramble huh? I forgot where this post was going, but It stops here! Catch ya on the next one.
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