PyCon Ireland 2014 Rider/coder Daniele Procida

All about me ✤ Daniele Procida ✤ I work at Divio (Zürich) ✤ Django core developer ✤ Don’t be afraid to commit ✤ evildmp on IRC, GitHub, Twitter, etc. Don’t be afraid to commit: https://dont-be-afraid-to-commit.readthedocs.org

Divio http://divio.ch is a small but significant Swiss company. We’re extremely active in the world of Python and Django, both as enthusiastic users of it and supporters of it (for example, we’re sponsoring the workshops at this event). I get to work on things like: • django CMS http://django-cms.org, open source, and probably the best- known CMS project for Django • Aldryn http://aldryn.com, our amazing cloud-based hosting platform for Django developers Do come and talk to me about Aldryn (I have some vouchers) or django CMS. And I get to come to events like this for my job and if I were having any more fun it would probably be illegal.

We’re hiring http://divio.ch remote & onsite Zürich, Switzerland And, we’re hiring. It’s a great company to work for, speak to me if you’d like to know more.

Rider Having been so kindly invited to speak here at PyCon, I am going to repay that kindness by speaking to you about cycling. It’s true that there are certain similarities between programming and riding a bike. They’re both done sitting down, for example, with your wrists out in front of you. They both involve the careful piloting of amazing machines. But let’s not exaggerate. Usually when I do a talk like this I have an argument to put forward or a case to state, or an idea that I’m anxious to promulgate; usually it’s something political or philosophical, something I want to persuade you about. This time, I don’t have anything so clear to share. But, I think there’s something here that has a bit of light to shed on us and what we do, and more importantly what it does to us. It’s good for us to raise our eyes from our screens now and then, so consider it an invitation to do that. And also, I want to know what other people think about these questions, because some of them are still not very clear to me, and I am not sure how widely some of my experiences are shared. And also, bicycles! You are a polite and captive audience, so I am taking advantage of that to talk about one of my favourite subjects.

I want to talk about some books. Three of these books are about programmers. Three of them contain a memorable bicycle ride. In two of them, the narrator is implicated in murder. There’s • one about a Dutchman who admires his beautiful wrists in a bicycle race • one about a depressed French programmer who takes a bicycle ride • a book about an Irish gentleman farmer who has a love affair with a policeman’s bicycle • and a book about some young programmers who in fact don’t do any significant bicycling but all these books are connected to each other and to what we do. So let’s begin with The Rider, a novel by the Dutch writer and journalist, Tim Krabbé.

The Rider Tim Krabbé Tim Krabbé is also a chess grandmaster, who was once nearly good enough to have become a professional, and was an amateur bike racer - who was also nearly good enough to have become a professional, if only he had started not at the age of 30 but a decade and a half earlier. (Maybe if I had become a programmer not at the age of 39 but a couple of decades earlier I’d be a better programmer.) Tim Krabbé is pretty notable in each of these three spheres. Tim Krabbé’s website: http://timkr.home.xs4all.nl

White to mate in two He’s one of the few people to have prompted FIDE to change the rules of the game of chess, with a problem he devised in 1972. Here it is: White must mate in two moves. The solution: vertical castling. White’s pawn is under-promoted to a rook. In other words, Tim Krabbé exploited a vulnerability in the rules of chess! FIDE’s rules said: “The king is transferred from its original square, two squares toward the rook; then that rook toward which the king has moved is transferred over the king to the square immediately adjacent to the king.” They amended that to “towards a rook on the same rank”. Spoilsports.

In cycling circles, he’s best known for The Rider (1978; translated into English in 2002). It’s a short, extraordinary book, one of the few I read over and over again. Each time I read it something new in it strikes me; I read it for the feeling that I’m standing on the edge of some revelation, some hidden truth about the fabric of the world, and that if only I look through the text in the right way this truth will be disclosed to me.

Tour de Mont Aigoual The Rider describes a 137-km road race in the Cévennes, the fictional Tour de Mont Aigoual. The story is autobiographical, and although it’s a fictional race, it has been obsessively traced out on the real roads and ridden by a legion of fans of the book. The race route follows a figure-eight pattern (on its side, the mathematical symbol for infinity; perhaps that’s not a coincidence). Also, although I usually like to follow a nice linear argument when I give a talk like this, today I’ll be looping back on myself in just the same way.

Velo Ipsum Molteni tour de mont aigoual krabbe giro musseeuw reilhan, the Druber longo flamme rouge broom wagon. Omloop het nieuwsblad paris-roubaix rouleur derby tour de mont aigoual. Danseuse domestique. Cycles Goff riis flanders belleville, dwars door vlaanderen nyvelocity vuelta a espana leberg nyvelocity what would jens do. People return to The Rider obsessively - it’s not just me. There’s even a Lorem Ipsum generator for cyclists, and you can find fragments from The Rider in Franco- Dutch gibberish all over the web.

“I once gave myself the assignment of inventing a completely random word. Completely random, is that possible? And all of a sudden, there it was: Randomness The narrator of The Rider, who is also named Tim Krabbé, enjoys the kind of games and problems that coders do. “I once gave myself the assignment of inventing a completely random word. Completely random, is that possible? And all of a sudden, there it was:

“Batüwü Griekgriek” “Batüwü Griekgriek” (For some inexplicable reason, the English translator found it necessary to translate this too.) Batüwü Griekgriek has become a cherished, magical word amongst cyclists. People obsess about it, analyse it, debate whether it really is a random, spontaneous product of Krabbé’s mind, or whether he made up words until he found something that sounded random enough. It’s a talismanic creation, a word riders repeat to themselves to get through the worst suffering, including at least one professional racer that I know of. So let’s say that The Rider has made its mark on the world. When I read The Rider for the first time, I knew I by the end of the very first paragraph that I was in a book that was going to make a mark on my life. This is how it starts:

“Meyrueis, Lozère, June 26, 1977. Hot and overcast. I take my gear out of the car and put my bike together. Tourists and locals are watching from sidewalk cafes. Non-racers. The emptiness of those lives shocks me.” “Meyrueis, Lozère, June 26, 1977. Hot and overcast. I take my gear out of the car and put my bike together. Tourists and locals are watching from sidewalk cafes. Non-racers. The emptiness of those lives shocks me.” It didn’t occur to me that this had anything to do with programming, until a day a couple of months ago. I’d been up and travelling since the early hours of that morning, and finally after tram and aeroplane and bus and train rides I was sitting in the back of a taxi in Cardiff in the rain, just a few minutes from home, waiting for a red light to change. I’d recently been reading the book, on my trip away for two very intense weeks of Python and Django, of being a coder and little else. I was exhausted and felt faintly unreal. I watched people crossing the road, or sitting in their cars, or hurrying along going places, and the thought struck me:

Non-coders. Non-coders. And I was feeling so tired and strange that for a few moments Tim Krabbé’s sentiments and my own thoughts became confused in my mind, and I stared out at all the people with the uncanny feeling that we were somehow of different species. It only lasted a few moments, but that feeling of us and them, coders and non-coders, stayed with me, and I’ve been puzzling about it ever since.

What is it like not to be a programmer? Just as Tim Krabbé is able to put a date - 11th March 1973 - to the day he became a racer, I became a programmer on 29th April 2009. Ever since then, people for me have been divided into coders and non-coders. It’s still a thrill to me to discover that someone I meet is programmer, another member of this arcane society who can formulate incantations out of symbols, and make machines do their bidding. We share things - a power, but it’s not just a power - that non-coders don’t have. So, to the question of non-coders: what is it like not to be a programmer? Is there something special about us? Is there something really different, a gap between us and them? What does it take to cross that gap?

Being understood I didn’t realise until I became a programmer how hard it is to explain to people who aren’t programmers what programmers do. That I sit in front of a computer, yes, they get that, but that’s about it. Of course, before I became a programmer, I only had a vague idea of it myself. More recently, I’ve started to be aware of some of the implications of this gap of understanding.

“What gives this girl the right to raise her voice?” There’s a hilarious passage in Tim Krabbé’s book, where he is provoked to alarming levels of outrage by something perfectly innocent: a pretty girl standing by the road who has the temerity to cheer on the riders. The focus of his exasperation is simple enough to appreciate: here’s someone energetically expressing an opinion about something she doesn’t understand. “What gives this girl the right to raise her voice?” he demands, baffled and outraged. She’s responding to an idea of cycle racing, a product of “the cement mixer of journalism”; for her, the riders are symbols, ideas she has been encouraged to believe in, as meaningless as if they had fallen out of a cereal packet. A two-page rant follows, encompassing journalism, the clichés of road racing, the gear in which the girl rides the bicycle he imagines she must have, the sweatshirt that he’s then forced to admit she isn’t actually wearing but he’s sure is hanging in her wardrobe, even the way her milkman (“if she has one”) dresses. Maybe you already thought that cyclists were a little bit crazy. But in one sense, this is entirely reasonable.

Coding for all! There’s a strong notion that programming is a key basic skill that everyone should be familiar with (especially children). In the UK, in the last couple of years, the IT curriculum that has prevailed for two decades is being replaced by one focused on computer science, including programming. I used to teach that IT curriculum in secondary school; it was appalling.

The industry has itself is full of examples of the urge to invite more people in: • projects such as Scratch, the programming environment aimed at children • the very successful education track at PyCon UK that has run in recent years • the hugely popular Django Girls workshops • the Raspberry Pi, whose creators want “to see it being used by kids all over the world to learn [...] how to program”

And from outside the industry: • politicians (like the UK’s former Secretary of State for Education, Michael Gove) who want to see programming become a compulsory part of the school curriculum, like learning to read or do mathematics • cultural forces like the BBC - both as an institution ... • ... and in the person of numerous notable journalists (like the ubiquitous Rory Cellan-Jones). The BBC, like the British government, appears to be thoroughly behind “coding for all” initiatives like Year of Code - http://yearofcode.org In a way it’s not so new, and we’ve been here before. In the early 1980s the home computer revolution was, it was thought, going to make programmers of us all, and there were similar initiatives then. But, it didn’t. For the vast majority of people, their home computers became games machines, word processors and later their gateway to the Internet. They became users, not programmers.

I was one of them, a teenager in the 1980s with a Commodore 64, and what I really wanted was to be a programmer. I spent a great deal of time in front of the computer then, but never did progress beyond the very basics. In fact the experience made being a programmer seem more unattainable, made the gap seem greater, rather than less. And, of course, there’s some skepticism about the everyone-should-learn-programming agenda, and some strongly dissenting voices. It’s one thing for the people behind such initiatives as Django Girls or programming workshops for children at a PyCon to hold an event to encourage new programmers. It’s quite another for politicians and journalists and public figures who don’t even really seem to understand what programming involves to make pronouncements, launch campaigns or adopt policies based on the idea.

“Well-intentioned idiot” The naïve enthusiasm of the evangelicals of this agenda represents a significant disconnection between what they understand and the reality of programming. We as insiders might well feel exasperation at the outsider’s lack of understanding of our domain while they pronounce upon it, especially if they’re doing it with the hyperventilating excitement that seems to affect certain BBC journalists, or certain educators. Exasperated? Even the saintly Raspberry Pi foundation was once moved, when the hyperventilated excitement was doing more harm than good, to make a public remark referring to a certain “well- intentioned idiot”. It’s reasonable to feel irritated by those uncomprehending enthusiasts on the outside, who not only fail to understand what it is that we as programmers do, but also have little idea what it takes to become a programmer, and yet think that everyone should be a programmer. I want to know:

What gives these people the right to hold such opinions? What gives these people the right to hold such opinions? At least the cheering girl who sparks the irritation of the rider doesn’t believe that cycle racing is for all. At least the spectators who don’t understand what it means to be a racer, who don’t understand what racing means, don’t also believe that anyone could - never mind should - be a racer. At least no-one - not even the people who understand so little about racing that they imagine races are won by being the fastest rider - believes that becoming or being a racer is easy, or achieved without struggle and pain. So why do so many non-coders think the equivalent things about programming? I think that the gulf of understanding between them and us is far greater than we realise.

How to measure incomprehension Who understands us? Who does understand what we do? I think a reasonable measure - actually, the reasonable, the plausible measure of how well an occupation is understood is to be found in its place in the popular imagination. So that’s where we should look. In fiction - in literature, film, drama - who has successfully climbed into the mind of the programmer? Who has been able to describe or show what it’s like to to be one? I’m a reasonably well-read person. Looking at the books on my shelves I can see examples where a writer has successfully climbed into the minds and work of people engaged in all kinds of occupations. I can name examples from fiction - well-written, believable examples - of fictional surgeons, bank robbers, philosophers, textile manufacturers, blackmailers. I can name a few more examples from my bookshelves:

surgeons bank robbers philosophers textile manufacturers blackmailers cowboys nervous wrecks murderers insurance salesmen violinists novelists schoolteachers psychologists astronauts priests politicians spies disc jockeys post-office clerks prostitutes university lecturers railway inspectors waiters linguists vacuum-cleaner salesmen layabouts sailors actors musicologists Spanish Civil War volunteers payroll clerks 19th-century Italian nobles kidnappers buddhas pianists gauchos factory workers doctors pilgrims gun-runners cocaine addicts time-travellers deserters fishermen libertines judges lawyers slave traders drunks dogs gold-prospectors runaways singers prize-fighters whalers inventors debt-collectors script-writers God basketball players medical students would-be cosmonauts vigilantes knights nuns acrobats composers journalists entrepreneurs revolutionaries millionaires strippers bomber pilots swindlers airline pilots parfumiers film-makers broadcasters baby- snatchers photographers carpenters shop-keepers butlers gardeners insurance fraudsters jealous husbands private detectives slaves princes soldiers anarchists gamblers fur traders poisoners miners conscripts road-menders sheep explorers artists professional burglars drivers television repairmen diplomats civil servants secret agents drop-outs nursing-home residents scientists butlers refugees fundamentalists domestic cleaners castaways farmers police inspectors prisoners comedians monks librarians firemen vampires immigrants mathematicians pickpockets middle managers students poets advertising managers architects art critics arsonists village idiots amnesiacs hunters small town police chiefs hotel managers thieves literary editors stamp-collectors bricklayers emperors non-existent knights They’ve all been served, all reasonably well-represented in the literary imagination, by intelligent, perceptive creative minds who have been able to grasp and share something that rings true. But who has been able to do this for us? Who, in fiction, in drama, who has attempted to get inside the mind of the programmer? I can think of a grand total of two examples. (To put that into perspective, that is one more than the number of novels I have read that tell their story from the perspective of a 5000-year-old Sumerian bowl - The Collector Collector, http:// www.amazon.com/The-Collector-Tibor-Fischer/dp/0099268191)

Microserfs Douglas Coupland The first is Microserfs by Douglas Coupland, which is a kind and sweet-hearted book about a group of 20- somethings in the start-up scene of the 1990s, a few years before the dotcom bubble. He gets all kinds of things right; he gets into the lives and minds of his programmers, and he’s uncannily perceptive. It’s certainly worth reading, both for its literary value and for its insights into what sort of creatures programmers are. What it fails to do is get inside the head of the coder while coding; the business of programming is weirdly absent. We get programmers’ thoughts, conversations, dietary habits. We get their clothes, their beliefs, their fears, their anxieties, their jokes, their health, their politics, their religion. The one thing we don’t get is their programming.

Extension du domaine de la lutte Michel Houellebecq The only other book I have read that makes a decent job of getting inside the programmer’s head is Michel Houellebecq’s Extension du domaine de la lutte, published in English, for some reason, as Whatever. (It also has a significant bicycle ride in it, like two of the other books, and the narrator is implicated in murder, like one of them). Unlike Microserfs, this is a distinctly unpleasant if not actually repulsive book, about a depressed and unlikeable programmer who is damaging to himself and others. I’ve read it several times. Michel Houellebecq is a thoroughly troublesome person himself. He was tried (and acquitted) in France in 2001 of inciting racial hatred in one of his later books; he lived here in Ireland for a time, to be a safe distance from the death-threats; his own mother wanted to sue him, because one of his books contains a revolting portrayal of an appalling sluttish and neglectful mother with the same name as hers; he caused consternation a few years ago when he disappeared, and was feared kidnapped by terrorists (apparently he forgot he was supposed to be speaking at a conference); another of his books features the savage murder of a controversial novelist named Michel Houellebecq. I discovered just last week that his latest project is the starring role in a film called Near-death experience, about a man who goes out to commit suicide - on his bicycle. Anyway, though the portrayal of his programmer is extreme and repellent, though it reflects an ideology more than any reality I recognise, it is, like Microserfs, making a serious and successful attempt towards truth in its portrayal. Like Microserfs, it dives into the programmer’s thoughts, desires, despairs, relationships; into the programmer’s life. And like Microserfs, the one part of the programmer’s life it doesn’t get near is the programmer’s programming.

How much does it matter? Of all the books I’ve read, I can think of only two that even get close to the coder, but even then they don’t go near coding. Creative writers, who can successfully, truthfully, powerfully give us compelling insights into the heads of vacuum-cleaner salesmen, kidnappers and hunters when they are engaged in the businesses of selling vacuum-cleaners, kidnapping or hunting are somehow not able to do the same for programmers. If this is a measure of comprehension of the occupation of programming, then clearly it indicates that coding and coders are not understood, and that if certain politicians and journalists and public figures make naïve and silly pronouncements about programming they are only part of a much greater lack of public understanding. Of course cycle racing is very important, but software: that’s one of the world’s most significant industries, one that determines a great deal about how people live and work. So, for a bicycle racer to complain that a teenaged spectator doesn’t understand what he’s doing is one thing. It’s quite another if we feel that influential people like lawmakers and educators are making decisions and policies based on their incomprehension of how software is made.

Understanding the lack of understanding If there is a gap of understanding, is it a mutual one? Why can’t outsiders see into what we do? Why aren’t insiders writing about what they do? Is there something particular about what goes on in the programmer’s mind that makes it a hard gap to bridge?

What goes on in the mind I think that the way programmers are missing from literary fiction does say something about an inability to comprehend programmers. But the fact that even in the examples I have found that programming as an activity is missing makes me wonder whether there is also something about the business of coding itself that’s responsible for this gulf of comprehension. The Rider is an extended meditation, in real-time, on the business of racing. One of its concerns is what happens to consciousness on the bike. It’s multiply self-referential: the activity of riding affects the activity of thinking; while riding, the rider thinks about riding; while riding, the rider thinks about thinking while riding. Thinking about riding implies thinking about thinking while riding. Does anyone think, or talk, about thinking while programming?

Can programmers think? A cyclist can think. On the other hand, I am not at all sure what it’s possible to think about while programming, or if it’s possible to think about programming while programming, or even if it’s possible to think at all. I can’t really say what or how I think in front of the computer, in front of my code. I arrive with some sort of formulated, articulated notion, and try to spell it out for the computer, and the computer sucks up that formulated, articulated thought. It consumes it. In fact it’s worse than that: it doesn’t simply suck it up, it interrupts the stream of my thinking. If there were any supple articulations of reason or imagination in there to begin with, the encounter with the computer renders them into clunky, broken, unlinked forms. I’m quite good at thinking, but not when I’m in front of my computer trying to think about code. Tim Krabbé is a good climber, but a poor and fearful descender, hurtling down the Causse Méjean with a wall of rock on one side of him and the abyss on the other.

“I take the curves like a wooden puppet. [...] “The trajectory they follow has an animal grace, lending itself to mathematical expression in a formula of no more than four symbols - for mine you’d need a whole scratch pad full of last-minute corrections.” “I take the curves like a wooden puppet. [...] “The trajectory they [i.e. his rivals] follow has an animal grace, lending itself to mathematical expression in a formula of no more than four symbols - for mine you’d need a whole scratch pad full of last-minute corrections.” That’s me, writing code: like an ugly wooden puppet. Maybe other programmers have animal grace. Maybe your work is expressed in elegant code of no more than four symbols. Maybe other programmers can sit in front of their keyboards like jazz pianists, with their beautiful wrists in front of them, pouring out supple, meaningful lines. So I’d like to blame the computer, but maybe it’s just me.

Bicycles for the mind But whether it’s just me or not, I’m disappointed, because this is not what I was promised. I was promised that computing would be an extension of my intelligence, not something that made my thinking clunky. I was promised a bicycle for the mind. That’s what Steve Jobs decided that computers were, back in the 1980s. In fact, the Macintosh nearly got called the “Bicycle”. Apple once ran an advertising campaign, claiming that computers were “bicycles for the mind”.

There was an education effort, “Wheels for the Mind”. There was an Apple Macintosh bicycle logo.

Even the original Macintosh manual contained a two-page photograph of a cyclist and a Mac. Steve Jobs certainly wasn’t alone in considering the computer as some sort of vehicle for the mind. I think he must be wrong. He’s right about the effect technology has on our human powers, but I don’t think it works for computers the way he thinks it does. I think that the interrupting, jarring sensation I feel in front of the computer comes from the computer. The computer presses itself on the mind. The bicycle presses itself on the mind. So why not accept that the computer’s responsible for my clunky thinking?

The Third Policeman Flann O’Brien Which brings me to my final novel. It’s demented, dark and comic. It loops back on itself, returning to the start of its own plot, like The Rider’s race. It ends like Extension du domaine de la lutte does, with the narrator riding a bicycle that’s not his own, in a final attempt to regain something that he lost. In the case of Houellebecq’s programmer it’s his sanity; in the case of The Third Policeman it’s a money- box that he stole. The bicycle’s stolen too, from one of the policemen - or maybe it’s a willing, conspiring escapee. Near the start of the story the narrator, a murderer, turns up at a rural Irish police station. " Naturally, the first thing the policeman says to him is:

“Is it about a bicycle?” “Is it about a bicycle?” In fact the policeman seem to be quite insane, they are obsessed with pedals, wheels, gears, lights, pumps, saddles. They are also obsessed with the atomic structure of their bicycles. Everything is about a bicycle.

Atomic theory All physical bodies are composed of tiny particles in constant motion. When two physical bodies are come into contact with, they’ll exchange some atoms with each other; the more repeated and hard the contact, the more atoms will be exchanged.

“The gross and net result of it is that people who spent most of their natural lives riding iron bicycles over the rocky roadsteads of this parish get their personalities mixed up with the personalities of their bicycles as a result of the interchanging of the atoms of each of them “The gross and net result of it is that people who spent most of their natural lives riding iron bicycles over the rocky roadsteads of this parish get their personalities mixed up with the personalities of their bicycles as a result of the interchanging of the atoms of each of them ..

and you would be surprised at the number of people in these parts who nearly are half people and half bicycles.” ... and you would be surprised at the number of people in these parts who nearly are half people and half bicycles.” You can tell who these people are by the way they lean against walls or prop themselves up with a foot on a kerbstone - or a bicycle that behaves oddly.

A vehicle is not just a vehicle In other words, the technology we use doesn’t just take us places, we take on the nature of the technology we use. When we think of technology, we think of what we have made of it, but we sometimes neglect to think about what it does to us in return. We imagine technology - especially computer technology - as made in our own image, and fail to realise sometimes that it fashions us in return. A vehicle is not just a vehicle. Something of the bicycle does go into the rider; the bicycle forms and transforms the rider’s thoughts. So my last questions for you; perhaps you have some answers for me already. What are these bicycles for the mind doing to our minds? What does the computer do the coder? What is it doing to you?

Rider/coder I type in code, that’s true, into my scratch pad full of last-minute corrections. But that’s not where I ever any did any of my programming or found any of my solutions. The truth is, I do all my programming on my bicycle, along with all my other writing; that’s where the thoughts join up into structures that make sense, where the words join up into sentences. I get the feeling that it is not a unique experience, to climb off a bike at the end of a ride to work or a ride home to find that the solution to some coding problem has formulated itself while I was pedalling. I’ve pedalled my way through thousands of lines of code. Maybe you walk instead of pedal. Maybe for you it’s something else. Or maybe, this is just me, and it doesn’t work like that for you at all; perhaps you’re able to code at the computer with animal grace, not like an ugly wooden puppet, like me. I’d love to know how it works for you, what other programmers think about when they think about programming. It remains mysterious to me. But for me: all thinking has a rhythm; the bicycle provides me with a rhythm I can use, that feeds my thinking. The computer just has a twitchy, smashed-apart clattering, and I can only take so much of it at a time before it breaks apart the thought that my riding linked together for me. And then I’m no longer a programmer, I’m just a man sitting in front of a computer and I am not a programmer again until I climb back onto my bike.

Rider/coder ✤ Daniele Procida ✤ Divio, django CMS & Aldryn ✤ Don’t be afraid to commit ✤ daniele.procida@divio.ch ✤ evildmp on IRC, GitHub, Twitter, etc.