IT is mind-boggling
Information technology and computer science are fascinating fields. I owned my first computer at the age of 13, and the fascination has lasted ever since.
IT evolved in rapid steps, but in my early years in IT, computers always felt underpowered. We were constantly waiting for the next generation of CPUs, video accelerators, and whatnot. I remember having copy edited a term paper about recurring neural networks (RNNs) in the previous millennium. How I wished I could run that damn thing on the hardware we had at that time. It was beyond imagination back then to have hardware powerful enough to even run a tiny RNN with decent response times, let alone train it. Now look at LLMs today… This is what I mean: IT remains fascinating.
A perfect programming language
A personal quest of mine over the years was to find the perfect programming language. It was like fighting windmills, of course. There is no “perfect” programming language, and there will never be one. The question is, what’s perfect for me. My perfect language has a clear syntax, is easy to learn, its code is straightforward to read, it has little “magic” (in other words, what you read is what the code does), needs no pre-installed runtime, interpreter, or virtual machine, cross-compiles effortlessly, and generally goes out of your way to create great software with little effort. In one word: Go.
Spreading the word(s)
On my first real job in IT, I wrote an internal app and created the user documentation for it. A teammate read it and said to me, “Christoph, you should write!” His words somehow resonated with me, but it took some time until I made writing a core part of my work. First, I honed my skills in analyzing problems, creating solutions, and explaining them to users during my years in technical support.
When Go 1.0 came around, it happened that my employer closed almost all of their worldwide support centers. I took this occasion as a chance to combine my love for well-designed programming languages, my curiosity, and my writing and explanatory skills, and created a Go blog (live since 2016) and a Go course (live since 2018). I started writing in and about Go. Since then, I have been writing blog articles about Go and many other topics in IT.