I’m a self-taught developer, as many are. I don’t have any qualifications in terms of certifications or diplomas for programming. I have however spent most of my working life as a professional developer in anything from web to desktop applications to process automation. To do this, I dedicated time to teaching myself a thing or two.

It was back when I started out my journey in the professional IT world, and began working as a remote support technician, that I first got a taste for coding. We worked out of this office that was divided up into three sections: the pit, as we called it, was where all of the sales agents worked out of, Tier 2 was where I worked from and Tier 3 was the remaining section. There used to be this guy waltzing around like he owned the place, every day, walking up to all the girls a trying his best to flirt with them, flaunting off his new hardware bought with company funds, and generally living out a pretty sweet deal it seems. This guy was the programmer.

You see, the only IT capable people that the company required at that time were people that could be used as fodder for the remote support machine they were churning. People that sales could throw a freshly hooked client at and walk away with the commission money while we sat until all hours cleaning up some of the nastiest PCs imaginable.

The programmer, as he was very loosely referred to, was someone who had been there since the company’s inception and painted himself as an IT prodigy. In fairness, he did teach himself a bit of C#, enough to know what to copy and paste. It was very apparent that his position was greatly a result of his bragging skills. He was able to get laptops bought for himself, holidays paid, any working hours he wanted, and even had an apartment above the office, all expenses paid. He had a pretty sweet deal.

In seeing how bitchin’ things must be around here if you’re a programmer, I naturally wanted to buy myself a ticket. I did some research as to what language to choose. I eventually landed on Java, for reasons I can’t even recall, and began to read documentation and watch some poorly sounded Indian youtube videos on the topic. After some time, I was able to start writing basic scripts and tools. The OpSec situation around the office was so bad that I even managed to install my own chosen IDEs on my work machine.

Anyways, one thing led to another and I caught the attention of Mr. Bigshot when he peered over my shoulder one day. This is when he put me onto C#. I loved it the moment I tried it. C# was a much more elegant and concise method of achieving the same results I was obtaining in Java but with much better support from Microsoft. I was a language that was in the spotlight at the time for all future tech.

I’d stayed with C# for a few years, dabbling in Python or Perl or whatever little hobbies I had at the time along the way. I eventually landed on Node.js and Javascript once I started getting into web development and general purpose programming. This brings me right up to now: I want to learn something new.

I ran a very small poll on my Mastodon page recently asking tooters where they landed on my two picks for the next language I should learn, these being Python or Go. I’ve always liked Python, and Go caught my attention when Bettercap was revamped. There were other languages I was looking at, of course, but I chose these two for the sake of aiming in a direction.

Rust. Rust was thrown back up into my list of options when some fellow Fosstodon users made some great arguments for it. I started looking into the documentation today and I think I might give it a go. It looks great, especially seeing as it compiles its own binaries every time, and these are self-contained and require no additional setup on a user’s machine. I like the looks of it so far. So I think I’ll give Rust a go for the moment and see if I take to it. If not its Python or bust.