Smart People

I am a lesser geek. In the dog eat dog city of geekopolis, I am a mangy cur tipping over garbage cans. I fear the dog catcher will spotlight me and throw me in the back of a cargo van to totter off with the siren wailing: "IM-per-SON-a-TOR". It is true that I am not a pure bred geek.

I develop software. That's my day job. I develop a Java based web application that allows customer service representatives to access data about people involved in State Health programs, perhaps enroll them or check their address. Stuff like that. It's interesting work, the writing of code, and I enjoy it. But I went to school for writing english and reading litrachure. There are times at work when I feel like I am in way over my head. The past week has been one of those times.

I jumped head first into a different area at work, something a bit more hard core than my usual romp through the world wide web side of things. This area is new for me, but is old bones for most, and for those that care, it involves Java Threads. We have a lot of really smart people at work. They absorb this stuff. They make jokes about it that pass way over my head ("So the way I fixed it was to extend Thread, HAHAHA"). They talk about patterns and object graphs. They have degrees in Computer Science. Some of them have been coding since high school. I'm trying to tell you these people go home after work and they continue thinking about work because the like to.

I think it's cool. Don't get me wrong. I admire them for their skills and devotion. But man, keeping up with these punks is hard work. Especially because when they start going off into virtual machine land, I start picking apart their interesting usage of some word, and pretty soon I've lost the whole conversation. It's disturbing because these people count on me to deliver quality code.

Maybe I am too hard on myself, however. They count on me now to deliver top notch code, and so far I have held up my end of the bargain. I may not be a true geek, whatever that means, but I can fill in anywhere when needed. In the dog eat dog geekopolis, I am no Mastiff power coder, nor am I a Sheep Dog herding the code into magical formations. But I might be that tricky little likeable mutt that gets into everything, which is useful sometimes, making marvelous junk-code contraptions from tipped over garbage cans.