I have a confession to make...

I am not a coder!


Ah, that feels better, like a weight has been lifted from my chest.

Now, let me explain what I mean. I can code, I understand different design patterns, I can break a problem down into tiny little pieces, I can work out the sticking points. It just doesn't rock my world. I'd prefer to spend an hour reading about a new system, a new type of database, Apple's latest shiny new gadget.

At heart I guess I would prefer to spend my time fiddling with a large system and getting it running than staring at strings of characters and sword fighting while I wait for it to compile. Alright, maybe I wouldn't mind the odd sword fight in the office.


This is all well and good of course, I've got a new job that should help me do what I like, but in the past it has caused me a few problems. Firstly there was the boss that told me that I had to do programming for a while because every Systems guy worth his salt has done some programming. This led to a particularly painful part of my working life, where I slowly lost motivation as I repeatedly flung myself at the near vertical learning curve and slid back down to the bottom. Secondly there was the company I worked for that repeatedly told itself that it wanted quality software but didn't practice what they preached, it took a year of badgering from me to introduce code reviews. This was a problem because even though coding wasn't my Raison d'être I cared about whether the product I was working on was good and I know enough about coding to recognise bad code and coding practices when I see them.

Begrudgingly, I probably have to admit that my boss was right, I did need to spend a year or two trying to be a coder to come to the conclusion that I am, in fact, not. This lesson was important because I didn't really know what I was, and I was probably telling myself that I was a coder. There are several reasons for this I guess, I like creating things, doing something constructive and I once had the misguided impression that if you weren't crunching out lines of code then you weren't creating things, you where just assembling parts that someone else had built, not adding something new to the world. Now of course I realise that it is probably harder to be a full systems guy than a run of the mill coder. You need to understand a whole lot and see things that others probably wouldn't be able to see.

I guess the round about point that I am getting to is that, despite what you see around, there is plenty of space in IT for people who aren't coders at heart. Sure, I'm not going to Zuckerberg together a billion dollar website from my dorm room in the wee hours of the morning but equally no site like Facebook works without a whole lot os Systems guys in there doing the hard yards to keep the thing going.

And there concludes this holiday ramble.