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Monday 4 March 2013

How do YOU show your love of IT?

This is my tattoo. It signifies the two most important things in my life: programming and good grammar. Just in case you doubted how cool I am. ;)

Pic of my semicolon tattoo

Getting this tattoo was a little reward to myself for reaching the half-way point in my degree with my GPA still intact.

You might say a semicolon is an odd tattoo, but I'm very fond of the little thing. I've been a hopeless grammar pedant for, like, forever, and I wanna do my bit to make sure my favourite punctuation mark never dies out. My wrist isn't large enough for two independent clauses, so I settled for just the semicolon.

Even if emoticons will ultimately keep the semicolon alive, it makes me sad to hear 'Hey, is that half a winky* face on your arm?'.

* I'm the sort of person who googles 'winky winkey winkie' to get the spelling right, then looks up 'googles' in her dictionary app to confirm the lower case usage (Macquarie Compete Australian Dictionary which, by the way, is the very first app I put on my iPhone, for $34.99, while Hubby was still browsing the free games - priorities, people!).

But ... back to the other significance of my awesome tattoo. I fell into programming by accident and have only discovered how totally fun it is fairly recently. I never knew what I wanted to be when I grew up, so after school I ended up working in admin. For a long time I didn't know what I was good at, or what special skills I might have.

I'm old enough and/or the schools I went to were poor enough that if they offered computer courses I didn't know about it; the computer was basically a neat word processing tool to me. Of course when I entered the workplace the computer became much more useful, and I started to get a better and better understanding, as a user, of what computers can do. I'll skip the bit I mention in interviews, about how useful some of the things I learnt during this time were, and I'll land just before the bit where I say I enrolled in a BIT degree.

I thought I'd end up as a system analyst, if not on a helpdesk, but after one introductory programming unit I was hooked. I enjoy receiving a problem, working through the logic, and finding the most elegant solution I can. I enjoy thinking in code and can spend hours 'in the zone' at my computer. And yes, I also enjoy making sure all my semicolons are in place.

My tattoo says to me 'Amber, always remember, you've found something to be passionate about!'.

How do YOU show your love of IT?

Amber



P.S. Here are some others I also like:


'</head><body>' tattoo
Actually not a favourite; this
one just bugs me. Where are
the opening head and closing
 body tags? Link

JavaScript tattoo
There's an awesome explanation of this tattoo
on this guy's blog.

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