Hello! I've spent the last year of my life going through the Bret Victor -> Anarchist pipeline (no idea if this pipeline is unique to me or not). I started programming doing undergraduate physics research in materials simulation. I really enjoyed it and loved making 3Blue1Brown-esque animations to visualize research concepts that were tricky to fit in my head or on a whiteboard. After finishing my undergraduate physics program I got a job as a software developer for a big tech medical software company. I was optimistic that I could write code that would help people, but I spent 4 years working on projects that ranged from being potentially marginally helpful to a handful of healthcare IT workers, to projects primarily designed (IMO) to extract more money out of patients. Pushing back on these projects turned out to be too hard from me, and eventually decided the nice paycheck was not not worth the sisyphean task of trying to work against the financial interests of the US healthcare system. Looking for "alternative" approaches to programming, where motivations are centered around positive human values, I first came across Bret Victor's work. From there I found things like the FoC podcast, the Recurse Center, a gold mine of recorded Strange Loop talks, and lovely folks on Mastodon (me: Johnwithanh@hachyderm.io). It was amazing to suddenly find so many new programming concepts that look more like fundamental truths, and less like arbitrary design choices. Lots of people have put a lot of thought into how design programming languages/tools for humans, and carefully consider the effects they have on other humans. Why didn't anyone tell me sooner?! (obvious now, but I didn't know what functional programming was despite being a "professional" developer and completing a CS minor) I decided to quit my job without something else lined up (super privileged that this was an option), and spent a few months at the Recurse Center. Having the chance to build and learn whatever interested me and doing it with other people doing the same was wonderfully liberating! It reassured to me that programming could still be an edifying practice for me, despite its adjacency to some negative dominating forces of our current world. After Recurse I found a physics professor at a near by university looking for a research software engineer to build a visual programming system for researchers to prototype new MRI signal processing techniques. I honestly couldn't believe my luck! I started few months ago and have been building a simple node and wire system on top of tldraw for the UI. I'm excited to continue to learn from previous work in this area, and figure out an approach that works well for my problem domain. Learning a host of new paradigms has had a huge impact on how I write code, but what I appreciate most about these new paradigms and the communities adjacent to them, is the affect it has had on my worldview. I feel much more confident now than I did a year ago that the good and bad of our world today was never an inevitable conclusion, and that most obvious future is likewise undetermined. I'm hopeful that I can find sustainable ways to push for a more humane future of computation with people in communities like this one!

What's your full mastodon URL (including the instance)? With just the @-name, I don't know where to look to follow you.

Oops, URL fell off the rich text. https://hachyderm.io/@JohnWithAnH

Wow, someone else with a background related to research software! Welcome!

The Recurse Center is very dear to me ❤️ one of its founders (Sonali) is a good old friend I've known since high school and we're in our 40s now 😆 -- from your intro I'm guessing you should also be in #CBC968C1M? Welcome

@Arvind Thyagarajan I attended RC remotely from the mid-west (Madison Wisconsin). It was a really pleasant experience :)