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**Greetings, gang! **
It’s time to get cracking on the code bloggin’ and I figured there’s no better place to start than the beginning. So, a little bit about myself
My name is Craig
My working life has been split between performing arts and bikes. To unfold that statement a little bit, I spent a decade as a professional dancer. I have BA in Theatre with a minor in Dance from Loyola University Chicago, and a Master’s in Humanities with a performing arts concentration from University of Chicago. I have been a part of nearly any aspect you can think of in theatre in dance, with a particular interest in choreography and performance art research. I love to study, analyze, and create dance, to learn about all of its many parts before setting them in motio.
For the bikes half, they’ve always been there. I’ve raced bikes, decided not to race, and then decided to buy a license and race again. Repeat as necessary. I’ve worked as a bicycle messenger, a tour guide, a bike salesman, and a mechanic. I deeply enjoy most anything you can do on a bike, from road racing to bikepacking to mountain biking, and I only find myself enjoying these things more the older I get. Leaving the bike shop for a job that would give me time for coding school was a difficult choice. But, hey, I’m learning to code, and I like my new job. Life works out sometimes
The important part, the codey stuff. I’ll tell you two little spiels about why I started to code.
I told you I was a mechanic. Building, repairing, and maintaining things is enjoyable for me. You don’t really get “sexy” repairs when you fix bikes. You get good looking customer bikes, either top-end halo bikes or really boss garage-sale finds, and you get dad’s bike that the guy just can’t throw away, and then that same day, you get something that was fished out of a dumpster. You fix them all, and do what you have to get the bikes as close to perfect as possible. The better a mechanic you are, the easier this gets (until maybe you know too much and the perfect fix is forever out of grasp, but let’s set that aside for now). When you start off, the concert of components working together is a mystery. It feels like it takes forever to understand how the bits are to be adjusted and why some adjustments work at all. Eventually, though, you reach the point, where there’s almost nothing you can’t do. I still won’t call myself an expert, but I can’t tell you what the date was when I could look at a full service board, and perform any task that was on it. Sure, there will be some stuff I’ll need more training and practice to perform proper build or adjustments on, but all I have to do is learn how to do it, and then do it, hey?
Well, I’m pretty sure that all that stuff up there applies to coding, too, right? You learn the components, you assmble them, you set them in motion. You fix them when they break, adjust them to meet their usage, etc. My friends who code, they talk about their jobs, and it’s so surprisingly similar, the combination of precise knowledge mixed with creativity that allows them to flourish in their careers. In fact, what’s so amazing about coding are the abundant opportunities you have to go out and actually learn the trade. I can count on my hand with a mitten on where one could go to learn to be a bike mechanic.
Now I’m going to throw something else out there. I told you before about my interest in performing arts research. The saying about humanities is that it may not pay a lot, but at least it’s not getting automated. Not automated, no, but they are certainly evolving. Algorithmic theatre, motion capture, and universities launching departments of digital humanities: innovation has always been an essential part of the artistic experience, and these new means of creation and examination are a part of that tradition. In grad school, I studied how the human condition in performance out can be abstracted away or realized in previously unimagined ways, when the body in motion can be reduced to discrete sets of data, captured, adjusted, and reassembled or further deconstructed. After that, I had to see how it worked, and frankly, if there was a way I could find some work in it while I’m at it.
Now to weave the threads together. I enjoy working, especially when it’s something I’m good at doing, but I can’t stay at the same level forever, and that’s just what I’ve been doing. So that’s why I learned to code: I’ve got a lot of ideas and I’ve taken a good look at my skills, and when I weighed the two against each other, it came out to coding being the good direction for me to take. I can find a lot of satisfaction in this kind of work, and as I develop, there’s new industries and new needs to address that I can discover. Right now, I work for a marketing intelligence company, and working in development for them would be pretty dope. And maybe that’s my springboard to the next industry to discover or the next start-up. Maybe I’ll synergize coding and dance, or work in app development for bikes, a veritable garden of for consumer apps.
Let’s have a look.
-Craig with a C