For me, programming is but a paintbrush. As a writer yields the word and a painter wields a paintbrush, I wield the programming language. For me, to program means to take a full/semi-formulated idea and illustrate it on a document for a compiler to interpret, carving away a line at a time until there is a formulated picture.

What really interests me is the human mind and how it works. Sitting right at the top of our necks, we have such an awe inspiring tool. We can store information equivalent to the complete works of a library, solve extremely complex mathematics, discover the world around us, and develop languages to communicate with each other. These are where my interests lie.

The first field that I find fascinating is linguistics. English, French, Spanish, Latin…. these languages all, to some extent share the same root. There are many other such groups of language. Over time, sounds get added, sounds get chopped off, words gain and lose emphasis. Slowly, what was one language bends and melds to form a completely different language. While these languages may still share some similar words, training is required for a speaker of one to be able to understand another. The languages have evolved.

But that’s not the only thing I find fascinating about linguistics. Record a person speaking for an hour. Make sure to record only one person’s speaking. What can we learn from this audio clip? Several fascinating things. First of all, context. We can teach computers to understand individual words, but this is where they start struggling. We, as humans, can take a segment of text and have it evolve over time, picking up various clues from the environment and previous conversation to develop these phrases. Without this context, one phrase could mean several entirely different things depending on how you look at it. When you start thinking about how you would develop this characteristic in a computer program it seems incredible that we can even understand it ourselves.

Let’s examine the conversation from another angle. This time compare with a second conversation. What the heck, add a third. What do you find? If you look closely, you will find clues about the speaker. First, you can start picking up things about the speaker’s education level and intelligence level. But if you look a little bit deeper, things get more interesting. You can start seeing things such as confidence level, how outgoing the person is (are they an introvert or extrovert?), gender, profession, Myers Briggs type, hormone levels, and a host of other things. I’ve been listening to the Secret Life of pronouns recently, and this book delves into how much the pronouns we use, words that our brain naturally ignores, reveal so much about ourselves and our personalities.

The next topic that I find really interesting is education. Different people have different personalities. Different people learn differently. However, from what I’ve read and experienced, it sounds like the educational system is lacking something for many of us. Studies have shown that up to 70% of people have either become disengaged and lost interest or dropped out by the end of high school. Why is that? How can we fix it? One of my favorite classes in college was taught by a man who was fascinated in his work and let it show. He found ways to inspire his students and keep them running. With that inspiration, students were not only able to pick up the material in the class, but go well outside of the curriculum of the course and cover that as well. I personally believe that the opposite of disengagement is inspiration and would love to understand better how to instill that in courses. I’m also curious what other ways there are to get students engaged in courses. I’m also curious whether there are better and more effective ways for students to learn as well as better ways to measure learning comprehension.

Currently we are on a test based system in the United States. Students spend the first 16 weeks learning material for a course and then spend the last week taking an exam that has them fill in a whole bunch of answers to determine if they have learned the material or not. While this may be the only effective way to determine if a student has learned the material for some classes, I think there are better ways for the majority of classes. Exams add unneeded stress and pull students out of the materials that they would have in their daily lives to help them take advantage of this material. On top of that, we take the output of these unrealistic situations and use this as the basis for whether students move onto more advanced materials, get into certain colleges, or even get into certain professions. A little extreme if you ask me. Instead, I think that a project based system would probably be better. Have the students build a project either at the end or over the course of the semester. Create an original work using all of the resources available to them in order to illustrate what they’ve learned from the course. Let them take advantage of the materials in order to show what they’ve learned. This may or may not be the correct answer. I don’t know. But this is a field that I find fascinating.

Get out of the educational industry and we find the same problems in the workplace. People are bored and disengaged with what they are doing. They bounce from job to job and often don’t want to be at the one that they have. For some place that people spend the majority of their lives at, I find this incredible. From an employee’s perspective, I believe that each and every person would feel more excited, engaged, and fulfilled if they were fascinated by what they do. From an employers perspective, I think that the company would find faster output, more innovation, and higher profits with more engaged employees. I believe that employee engagement travels not just through the company, but outside as well. Employees don’t just interact in isolated environments. Sales and support people interact directly with the customer. Other employee’s work indirectly or directly affects the customer as well. Higher quality and higher output means happier customers. Not only that, but all employees have their own communities that they interact with. Happier employees are a great source of free advertising and an excellent opportunity to bring in new customers.

Finally, and at the route of all, we have thought processes. How do people think? What makes them happy? What makes them excited? What varies about the personality between two people? Do people in similar professions share similar interests? I love studying topics such as Myers-Briggs/Jung personality tests, motivation books, reading about how different cultures operate, etc.

Yes, I’m a programmer. It’s an excellent job. But for me it’s not the ability and process of writing or debugging code. That’s the boring part. For me it’s taking a problem and dissecting it. How do you help people learn better? How do build a robot that understands language? How do you build a robot that can find it’s way through a maze? How do you write a program that can look through a person’s experiences in a field and recommend ways for them to improve based on current and future market ideals? For me, the truly fascinating part of programming is taking a problem and fiddling with it until you find a solution. The actual act of writing code could be writing in English, a programming language, drawing a picture, or any range of other things. It just so happens that the writing tool of choice for computer science is the programming language.