Pycon NL: The attentive programmer - Daniele Procida¶

Tags: pycon, python

(One of my summaries of the one-day Pycon NL conference in Utrecht, NL).

Personal note beforehand: I’d like to point at a previous talk by Daniele at djangocon EU in 2014 about diversity in our industry.

Daniele once interviewed a programmer for a position. “Why do you enjoy programming?” The answer: “When I’m programming, I’m a god. I create things out of clean air.”

You can create things. It is more than “doing things”. Or “merely commanding”. I cannot make something exist in the real world just by saying “let there be light”. But in programming I can! I can do x = 1 or c = Camera().

Programming as intention. “Fiat voluntas tua”, thy will be done. You want something. In programming, you even write tests to check whether what you intended actually turned out right :-)

Daniele likes to program, but isn’t really good at it. Which is fine with him. He also likes photography, but isn’t really good at it, too: this one hurts him quite a bit more. A famous photographer once said “your first 1000 photos are your worst”. But once you stop for a while, the counter seems to reset to zero.

Programming as intention? There is also attention. Intention is a bit “reaching towards something”. Attention is about being there, with something. Intention is future, attention is present.

He thinks he isn’t as good a photographer as he wants to be because he’s not so good at attention. He showed a couple of photos by his favourite photographer Garry Winogrand. Garry often photographed in quick way, spotting opportunities. Garry really was “paying attention”. Spotting great photos in the randomness of the real world.

There is power in attention. You express being present. Which is a power all of its own.

Developer exhaustion is a known problem. You ask a programmer too much, they have no more to give. As an analogy, the same can occur when developing analog film rolls: you use a “developer solution” to chemically develop them. When the developer solution has been used too much, the films don’t come out right.

Daniele modeled his favourite mechanical analog camera in python code: https://c-is-for-camera.readthedocs.io/ . It is a program that doesn’t actually do anything. It models the camera and its behaviour and its detailed mechanisms and the relationship between the mechanical parts. It was Daniele paying attention to his favourite camera, really getting to know the mechanism. You could say really getting to know his camera. You could say it was a love program for his camera!

You can have love programs just like you can have love songs.

He closed with part of a poem by Mary Oliver:

Pay attention
Be astonished
Tell about it